04 · Organisation & Transformation

Building a High-Performing Organisation

Restructure and operating-model redesign of a failing technology function.

When I joined, the function wasn't delivering

The international technology function supported 64 people across the UK, Brazil and Bermuda and was responsible for keeping the business running and delivering the technology and change needed to move it forward.

In the year I joined, it had delivered no projects. The year before, it had delivered two.

System availability was poor. The technology estate was holding back the business. Trust in the technology function had deteriorated.

There was a strong culture of blame and a leadership structure that required most decisions to come back to the top.

Understand the problem before changing it

I was brought in by the Group CIO to turn the function around and integrate it with the wider Group technology organisation.

I had the authority to change the structure, people and vendors.

I didn't start with an organisation chart. I started with the business.

I stabilised the immediate support environment and then interviewed the senior and middle leadership teams, along with people across the business.

I wanted to understand what the technology function believed it provided and what the business actually needed.

I mapped responsibilities, handoffs and workloads and looked at the capacity of the team against the work it was expected to deliver.

There were no meaningful performance measures, so I introduced a KPI framework.

The conclusion was clear.

The people weren't the problem

Morale was low.

People had become accustomed to being told they weren't good enough and had started to believe it.

They knew the organisation wasn't working and wanted it to change.

What they lacked was an environment in which they could make that change.

The blame culture had become deeply embedded.

One leader described a project post-mortem as bringing everyone together so that you could identify the person responsible for the failure.

I wanted something very different.

Give people somewhere to stand

I restructured the leadership team into five clear areas: Development. Infrastructure. Business Change. Support. Testing.

Each leader became accountable for their area and empowered to make decisions.

My role was clear: I remained ultimately accountable, but I would support their decisions publicly, even when I disagreed with them privately.

That distinction mattered.

Their teams needed to know who was responsible for decisions and needed to see that the leadership team was working together.

For the first time, people had somewhere to stand.

Break the silos

The structure was only part of the problem.

The way the teams worked had to change.

Previously, work could be passed from one team to another with the implicit message:

Give people ownership

One of the simplest changes had one of the biggest effects.

I stopped project managers imposing arbitrary task deadlines.

Instead, the person doing the work set their own deadline.

If someone else gives you a date, it is easy to explain why you couldn't meet it.

If you choose the date yourself, you own it.

The approach improved estimation and, more importantly, created accountability.

I wanted people to feel ownership of delivery rather than simply responsibility for completing a task.

I also established a consistent communication rhythm and made it normal for me to speak directly to anyone working on a project.

Problems surfaced earlier. Decisions happened faster. The distance between leadership and delivery reduced.

There was plenty of work. We just weren't organised to deliver it.

When I arrived, the team didn't even have a meaningful project pipeline.

People didn't know what was coming next.

After three months, I had identified a backlog of 75 initiatives.

The problem wasn't demand.

It was the ability to prioritise, resource and deliver it.

The new operating model gave us a way to make those choices.

We could have an honest conversation with the business about what mattered, what we could deliver and when.

The decisions that mattered

Turning the function around required some uncomfortable decisions.

The first was saying no to an executive leadership team that wanted to pursue a business expansion opportunity.

The opportunity was attractive.

But the technology estate was not sufficiently stable to support it within the timeframe required.

I said no.

I promised myself that it would be the only time I would ever have to say no to the executive team because of the condition of the technology function.

The answer wasn't to make the business accept its limitations. It was to fix them.

The second difficult decision was removing roles as part of the restructure.

Headcount reductions affect everyone — those who leave and those who remain.

The third was cancelling an existing project.

The team had invested heavily in it, but it was high risk and offered little business benefit.

It wasn't going to deliver the outcome the business needed.

We stopped it.

Trust is earned through behaviour

I introduced clear accountability matrices and linked performance to delivery outcomes.

But the biggest change was behavioural.

People were given authority to make decisions.

And when they made those decisions, I supported them.

I created a weekly surgery where anyone could speak to me directly.

It was rarely used. That was fine. People valued knowing that it existed.

Underperformance was addressed, but support came first.

Those who stayed responded to the new expectations. They raised their game.

The culture began to change because the behaviour of the leadership changed first.

The first proof

The first project completed under the new model was the real test.

It was a very different experience.

The team committed to a delivery date with the business.

And delivered it.

That didn't prove the transformation was complete.

But it proved the new way of working could work.

From two projects to fifteen

The real turning point came 18 months after I joined.

The change wasn't simply volume.

The executive leadership team had started trusting the function with increasingly complex and challenging programmes.

Technology had stopped being a constraint on the business.

It had become a capability through which the business could pursue its objectives.

The outcome

The transformation produced a significant change in both performance and cost.

Headcount reduced from 45 to 21.

Staff cost reduced by 50%.

Productivity increased by 15 times.

Delivery times and service levels improved significantly.

Employee engagement increased.

After the initial restructuring, staff turnover reached record lows.

Customer satisfaction increased considerably.

The function had moved from being a poorly performing drain on resources to becoming a trusted adviser to the executive team.

The new operating model used a small permanent core, supplemented by specialist contract resources for projects and a flexible offshore development capability.

The offshore and contract teams were treated as part of the organisation, not as an external workforce.

They participated in town halls and functional meetings and were held to the same expectations.

The final measure of success

Perhaps the most important change was what happened to my role.

I no longer needed to run the day-to-day operation.

The leadership team could do that themselves.

My role became a gentle hand on the tiller — watching, supporting and course-correcting when necessary.

That was the point at which I knew we had built something rather than simply fixed something.

The lesson

A struggling organisation doesn't always need more people.

Sometimes it needs clarity.

People need to know:

What am I accountable for?

What decisions can I make?

What does good look like?

And:

Will my leader support me when I make a decision?

The transformation wasn't achieved by finding a group of perfect people.

It was achieved by creating an environment in which good people could perform.

The real measure is whether the organisation can succeed when you step back.