The challenge
A county council serving 780,000 residents needed to save £18 million over three years while demand for adult social care and children's services kept rising. Its transformation programme listed 64 change projects across every directorate.
Most were behind schedule. Only around a third had delivered on time in the previous year, and the council could not say with confidence how much of the planned saving had been achieved. Each directorate used its own approach to project management, some used none, and the small central transformation team spent most of its time chasing updates. Elected members had begun to ask, reasonably, whether the programme would deliver at all.
The assistant chief executive asked us to help the council deliver change reliably with its own people, rather than relying on consultants for each project.
What we did
We worked with the council for nine months in three stages.
Cutting the list. With the corporate leadership team, we reviewed every project against three questions: what problem does it solve for residents or staff, what will it save, and who will lead it. Projects that could not answer all three were stopped or merged. The portfolio fell from 64 projects to 29, each with a named sponsor and lead.
Agreeing one method. We worked with officers from every directorate to design a single change-delivery method for the council: five stages, a one-page project charter, a fortnightly review and a simple benefits log owned by finance. We kept it deliberately light, so a small project could use it in an afternoon and a large one would not outgrow it.
Building capability. We trained 46 officers as change practitioners over four two-day modules, each applying the method to a live project between sessions. Practitioners were assessed and certified by the Service Operations Institute. We then coached the leads of the ten largest projects through their first two stages and helped the council set up a change office of four people to support the method once we had gone.
The result
At the end of the first full year with the new approach, the council reported:
78%
of project milestones delivered on time, up from 35%
£6.2m
of savings delivered in the year, against a target of £5.5 million
46
officers certified as change practitioners, with 12 more in training
Officers also said the fortnightly reviews had changed the tone of conversations about change: problems surfaced earlier, and projects that were not working were stopped sooner.
The change office now trains new practitioners itself, using the material we handed over. The council has since used the same method for its highways and waste contracts.
“For the first time we can say what we are changing, why, and what it has saved, and we can do it ourselves.”
Assistant Chief Executive, the council
