Delivering at Pace:
Civil Service examples by grade

I supervise a team of four handling public correspondence. After a policy announcement, incoming letters tripled in two weeks and our backlog grew to 900 items against a 20-day response target.

I reviewed the backlog on the first day and sorted it into three groups: letters we could answer with an updated standard reply, those needing a tailored answer, and those for policy colleagues. I agreed clear daily targets with each team member based on their experience, and moved a colleague who was finding the complex cases stressful onto standard replies, where she was fastest.

I asked the policy team for an agreed set of approved lines within two days so we were not waiting on individual queries, and arranged temporary access to the drafting templates for two colleagues who did not have it. I checked progress against the targets every morning and moved work between people when anyone fell behind.

We cleared the backlog in five weeks, 96% of replies met the 20-day target, and quality checks found no increase in errors.

I managed a team of eight delivering a programme of 120 site inspections. Halfway through the year, two inspectors left and a new ministerial priority added 30 urgent inspections without extending the deadline.

I reassessed the whole programme within a week. Using risk data, I ranked the remaining inspections and agreed with my deputy director which lower-risk ones could move to a desk-based review, which the procedures allowed. That freed capacity for the urgent work without cutting corners on the high-risk sites.

I reset milestones with each inspector and gave the two most experienced full authority to plan their own regional schedules, while I kept a weekly tracker of progress against the programme. When one region fell behind in month nine, I moved a desk reviewer across and handled two inspections myself.

We completed all 30 urgent inspections and 112 of the original 120, with the other eight covered by desk review. No inspection was challenged on quality, and the risk-ranking method was adopted for the following year’s plan.

I was responsible for launching a new registration service required by legislation to go live on a fixed date, with a team of 25 across policy, digital and operations. Three months out, the programme was six weeks behind.

I held a reset session where each lead confirmed exactly what they owned, and I was honest with the whole team that the date could not move but the scope of the first release could. I agreed with the senior responsible owner a minimum release that met the legal requirement, and moved non-essential features to a second release.

I set up a fortnightly performance review for all workstreams with clear standards for reporting risk, and brought in two contract developers and a security specialist to keep the security accreditation on track. I also made sure the team saw its progress. I recognised milestones publicly and protected people from last-minute requests that were not part of the minimum release.

The service launched on the legal deadline, passed its security accreditation first time, and processed 14,000 registrations in its first month. The second release followed eight weeks later.