East Renfrewshire Council’s Environment Department wanted to rethink the way they delivered services in a way which allowed them to achieve their strategic ambitions whilst reducing costs and protecting frontline services.

The department had committed to embedding the council’s strategic ambitions around: Prevention, Modernisation, Community Engagement, Data and Digital entitled its ‘Five Capabilities’. The Director of Environment and his management team recognised that the changes required to deliver the 5 capabilities amounted to a fundamental transformation of the services they commission, facilitate or deliver and required a radical rethink of service delivery.

We supported the Environment Department to develop and deliver a transformation programme to achieve a new operating model. Our Adapt™ capability modelling tool was deployed to support the design of new capabilities for the department around commissioning, customer need, asset management, information as an asset and digital.

Using our Construct™ methodology, we designed a model which separated strategy, such as procurement, commissioning, business intelligence and policy from operations.

We delivered 5 redesign exercises, with a total of 10 services across the department designed to populate the model. The exercises reconfigured management and supervisory layers where new digital by design processes and the deployment of a new digital platform supported the automation of scheduling, authorisations and work allocation through business rules.

The outcome was a new model which achieved total savings of £4.9m, with each redesign exercise achieving savings in excess of 20% of available budget whilst protecting frontline services.