Scaling Digital’s Operating Model – from Firefighting to Focus

At the onset of the Herd’s engagement with a government department’s Digital Directorate, the directorate had scaled rapidly from 50-100 to approximately 500 staff over a three-year period. Capability was strong at a team level, however delivery performance was increasingly dependent on heroic effort rather than sustainable systems. The Directorate had successfully scaled its workforce but its operating model had not scaled with it.

The engagement initially began as support to strengthen Communities of Practice. Over a three month period, we worked closely with the Service Owner, Product Management, and Delivery Management professions, helping them connect practice to purpose and build professional cohesion. Through this initial work, a deeper insight emerged: the persistent challenges these communities faced were symptoms of the Directorate’s operating model, not the capabilities of the individuals themselves.

The engagement then pivoted upstream, strengthening the Directorate’s operating model by working with the Senior Leadership Team. Importantly, this was achieved without reorganisation or target operating model redesign. Instead, change focused on pragmatic improvements that helped them to get more from what they already had. We helped them to radically focus on one strategic and one tactical improvement at a time, the aim being to reduce time spent firefighting organisational issues, and increase time for delivery and strategic thinking. 

We supported leadership to formalise two complementary governance layers: the Strategy Board, operating with decision-focused agendas, explicit authority boundaries, action tracking, and follow-through & alignment around one priority improvement at a time; and the Operations Board.

Grade 6 digital leaders have since been formed into an Operations Board, acting as the Directorate’s middle-management integration layer. The aim is to reduce dependency on senior leadership intervention and provide coherence across teams.

After the first 3 months we had established a strengthened Product Leadership Team and created a Service Owner Handbook containing the core orientation guidance and a clear set of expectations for the Service Owner role in the Department.  

By the end of the 6-month point of the engagement we had worked with Senior Leadership to embed the governance, transitioning from informal coordination to structured decision-making. Middle management capability is currently strengthening and becoming operationally visible, institutional knowledge is being shared and maintained, delivery coherence has improved without structural reorganisation, and a startup-style operating model is evolving into something suitable for a scale-up. 

We supported the creation of a Digital Manual 1.0, the Digital Directorate’s first shared documentation on ways of working. The aim was minimal, usable clarity (not bureaucracy) so version 1 provided lightweight guidance capturing decision pathways and working norms.

We didn’t propose a strict Target Operating Model approach or another reorganisation, we helped them get more value from what they already had. We strengthened upstream decision conditions and allowed the first step towards a more coherent operating model to emerge, through hands-on and practical improvement.

We are currently in the final phase of our support. With our help, Senior Leaders are working to establish 3-5 cross-cutting operational improvement and delivery priorities. This will introduce explicit sequencing of improvement work, reduced working in silos, greater transparency of work-in-progress, clear visibility of leadership priorities to delivery teams, stronger feedback loops from operations to strategy, and the Directorate to shift from reactive activity to deliberate delivery.