Service leaders face constant pressure to deliver more with fewer resources, leading to repeated reviews of structures and staffing that often produce only marginal gains, while leaving entrenched, siloed ways of working untouched and limiting real innovation and wider service improvements.
Structures often evolve over multiple iterations for reasons of expediency rather than a clear understanding of what they are there to deliver, which can easily become obscured.
‘Form before function' is an oft-quoted maxim, but how do you harness it as an approach to drive impactful change without enduring an ‘ocean boiling' transformation?
Here are some steps to achieving this:
• Be clear about your service offer and how people approach and navigate your services – mapping and understanding behaviours, touch points, and pain points.
• Track and understand what drives service demand and in turn the flow of work through a service. This will baseline the level of delivery capacity needed and measure the impact of digital shift and AI initiatives.
• Tip processes delivered within operational silos on their side and see how they can be realigned end-to-end or as a whole-system approach, to design out complexity and duplication.
• Establish accountability for outcomes, with performance and satisfaction measures focused on impact rather than effort.
• Rescope leadership and delivery roles to be more open, promote transferable skills development and flexible working.
A service blueprint or target operating model can be used to encapsulate the benefits of a bold new functional design – better aligned, simplified and flexible, to engage stakeholders, leaders, and frontline staff.
Resulting operational structures based on an understanding of function will be better aligned to the priority needs of service users, will be based on a fuller understanding of the capacity and skills sets needed, with shared measures of success and accountability for them.
Be clear about what you are trying to achieve before you commit to the structure to deliver it. Through a function first approach, a flexible and optimised structure will quickly emerge, capable of delivering lasting value.
Alistair Sharpe-Neal is a Director at Campbell Tickell
