My work at the centre of government was focussed on improving the way we deliver major digital change programmes.
At the time, government had approved over £80 billion to spend on 41 major transformation programmes across 10 departments and one public body. At least 19 of these, costing almost £38 billion, were primarily digital transformation programmes. These ranged from the Home Office’s £145 million Smarter Working Programme, designed to improve workspaces, technology and operations, to HM Courts & Tribunals Service’s £1.65 billion Reform Programme, intended to transform the courts’ service including making more cases digital, to Universal Credit, which was replacing six means-tested benefits for working-age households by 2023 and estimated to cost £13.5 billion.
In short: we had a huge portfolio of transformation programmes that were increasingly digitally-enabled, and as a nation we were already ‘banking’ huge savings that were supposed to be achieved from these. And we were not famously good at big digital transformation. How could we improve UK government’s chances of successfully delivering the promised improvements?
My work covered a range of efforts to support cross-government transformation.
I co-authored the 7 Lenses of Transformation, published in 2018. This offers a practical guide to understanding complex transformations, providing a consistent framework and a common language for designing and evaluating large government transformation projects.
I helped create the Transforming Together events and build stronger links in the transformation community around government, to understand their needs. We created the Transformation Peer Group, a network group for SROs of transformation. Run by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) and Government Digital Services (GDS), it is a forum to share challenges and insights, and prompt action on what needs to change.
Many of these efforts were developed further, and featured in The Art of Brilliance: A Handbook for Leaders of Transformation Programmes published in 2025 by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority with a foreword by Sir Mark Sedwill, Cabinet Secretary.
I also contributed to a range of public events like the Major Projects Association, to develop the thinking on digitally-enabled major programmes nationally.
In my Cabinet Office role at Government Digital Service, I led the production of the Government Transformation Strategy. I also did a substantial amount of engagement with other governments from around the world who were keen to learn from our work and share experiences, and later worked on formalising the UK’s commercial offers to international governments.
