Westminster City Council
Outputs instead of outcomes: A paradigm shift to deliver value.
The Background
Westminster City Council was facing unprecedented change and disruption. A new political administration brought bold ambitions to transform services and tangibly improve outcomes for residents and businesses.
The council had been through a significant change, separating from its bi-borough IT service and creating a sovereign Digital and Innovation service. This new service was keen to implement new product ways of working and ensure that its impact and focus were aligned to the strategic ambitions of the council.
While activity levels were extremely high, the team recognised that more clarity was needed around what really mattered. The team had numerous projects underway and needed to move the dials on urgent priorities more quickly. The service was looking to put some guidance and pace around agile delivery and product ways of working, ensuring teams were focused on value, and that there were enabling ways of working, governance and culture to support this change.
The leadership team recognised outcomes mattered more than outputs, and so a smarter, more integrated approach was necessary. The Digital & Innovation team needed a partner who could quickly identify opportunities for improvement in operating model, governance and ways of working. A partner who could co-create belief in the future vision, coach their teams to build confidence and excelled in modern, empowered and outcome-focused ways of working.
Our Approach
The leadership team engaged Sullivan & Stanley to accelerate the transition from a project to product mindset and operating model, instilling a culture focused on outcomes.
Our role was to enable them to:
- Help the team focus on objectives and key results
- Introduce lean, user-centric product development practices to replace traditional project methodologies
- Provide hands-on coaching to teams on embedding agile and collaborative ways of working
- Create enthusiasm, confidence and belief in the new ways of working
- Rapidly identify mismatches and issues in the operating model impacting successful delivery
We began our engagement by facilitating a series of intensive working sessions with the senior leadership team around Westminster's existing vision, objectives and quantitative key results for the next phase of change. Communicating this clearly provided strategic alignment and gave all staff increased visibility on the priorities they needed to focus on.
Two newly formed product teams had been mobilised by the leadership team in the priority areas of customer experience and employee experience. We provided intensive coaching to these teams on lean, user-centric ways of working, modern product management, service design and delivery basics. The focus was on rapidly instilling confidence in these teams through hands-on learning and giving them the foundations to deliver measurable outcomes over outputs.
In parallel, we supported the development of OKRs, and took a holistic view across the service identifying additional areas where adaptations could be made such as in architecture, governance, leadership team cohesion and more. We worked with the team to identify challenges, propose solutions and remove blockers to enable the identified improvements to be delivered.
We also designed and facilitated highly engaging agile bootcamps where over 100 staff learned about agile, product development and modern delivery practices through practical individual and team exercises. Removing laptops and phones forced creative thinking, collaboration and importantly, fun. The enthusiasm created pulled staff into a growing community of practitioners hungry to drive change.
The Outcome
In 10 months, Sullivan & Stanley enabled the Digital & Innovation team to:
- Establish strategic OKRs, providing the opportunity for clear direction and alignment
- Empower two newly established product teams to iteratively deliver measurable outcomes and value
- Develop a tailored delivery framework and backlog of practices to enable scaling of agile ways of working
- Build an enthusiastic community of over 100 talented practitioners hungry for change
- Nurture hidden talents by promoting individuals; for example, one Business Analyst’s talents were recognised to develop into a Product Owner role
- Coach Delivery Managers to excel in an agile environment
- Start to engrain a high-performance culture across product teams focused on outcomes and service improvements for residents
These tangible results validated the potential for sustainable change, laying the groundwork for further evolution towards resident-centric, data-driven services. This further emboldened and energised practitioners to visibly step forward and assume leadership in helping their colleagues apply new ways of working. Their self-belief and authenticity ignited the curiosity of their colleagues, re-energising the change momentum to reach across multiple product teams.
Their journey to leverage new ways of working has only just begun, but the Digital & Innovation team now have a blueprint to sustain change and radically improve outcomes in for those who matter most - their residents and businesses.
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