The Department for Transport…

Flexible Deployment

This project has been so successful that it is promoted as best practice in Central Government.

The Department for Transport is one of the Prime Minister’s key delivery departments. The Permanent Secretary, Sir David Rowlands, invited us to assist him in devising the means of fundamentally changing his department from a traditional structured hierarchy into responsive, project based organisation able to respond quickly to Ministerial initiatives and industry problems.

We devised and is rolling out the methodology which, amongst other things, involves defining then capturing staff competencies and capabilities and comparing them to project characteristics and role profiles so that ideal teams can be constructed through selection, deployment and development activities.

This programme is delivering a fundamental change in the management culture of the Department. For the first time managers, are able to forecast and prioritise work and then deploy skilled resources appropriately. The processes and systems we devised are now being used in for annual and in-year business planning enabling an understanding of the full impact of achieving efficiency savings and presenting Ministers with real choices on future strategic direction.

We integrated the Professional Skills for Government (PSG) competency framework into the approach so that staff development can now be fully considered in the business context with the impact of skills and competence shortfall being known for the first time.