Additional Resource required to Organisational and Leadership Development

Sefton Council is starting to think about its future role and how it will play its part in delivering the 2030 vision for the borough.

Like many councils across the country we are faced with significant financial challenges, rapid changes in policy and increasing demand on our services. While this is an unprecedented time of change and challenge it brings with it a huge opportunity to think and work differently, to consider how we interact with our residents and to re-think our role as a council.

Our approach will be one of delivering services differently, working in partnership with other public service partners, communities and businesses, investing in new approaches and ways of working that deliver a financial return, and engaging with the communities across Sefton in new ways to make the most of everyone’s talents and skills.

This approach is very different to our traditional model of service provision so we will need to re-design what we do and how we do it.

In Sefton we have a committed and talented workforce; we have active and engaged communities who work with us to solve local problems. We have strong local and regional partnerships and an active role in Liverpool City Region. We have the right foundations to enable us to rise to this challenge and to start to redesign the council and begin our journey of thinking and delivering differently.

Redesigning the council’s role and ways of working will take time and tenacity, it will need to be well thought out and based on evidence about what works and what is right for our communities. We have already started engagement with the workforce, communities, businesses and partners through our 2030 vision consultation. Over 5,000 people have been involved and shared with us their priorities for change and what their wishes and wants for the future of Sefton are.

From our preliminary work we believe there are four major themes to thinking and delivering differently:

1. Public Sector Reform – improving the way the public sector works with residents
2. Growth – enhancing our economic base through business growth and development, infrastructure and housing
3. Service Delivery – delivering the right services at the right time and in the right ways
4. Investment - capitalising on our assets and maximising their potential
Since May 2016 we have been prioritising Public Sector Reform and Service Delivery, to work out what we can do differently, what will present the biggest opportunities for delivering the Sefton 2030 vision and what this means for the councils services. We have identified 8 Public Sector Reform Projects we want to explore:

1. Early Intervention and Prevention
2. Environment and Pride in Place
3. Education Excellence Everywhere
4. Special Educational Needs and Disability
5. Commercial services
6. Digital services and inclusion
7. Asset and property maximisation
8. Commissioning and shared services
The first five projects are about developing new operating models for how we deliver our services and the latter three are enabling projects that will help us make the changes required.

Together these eight projects are our proposed Council Public Sector Reform Programme.

We are now at a stage where we want to explore these projects in greater detail and develop a business case for each one. We want to test if they are viable and start to define the detail behind them. To develop these business cases we are going to set up a small Programme Management Office with eight change teams (one for each project).

Annex A sets out the roles that will be in the programme, how it will work, how it is structured and governance.

The core task for the Project Management Office (PMO) and change teams will be to engage the wider Sefton Council workforce in the development of the eight projects. By doing this, our intention is to develop our overall Pubic Sector Reform change plan and change priorities. By January 2017 we want to be in a position where we can propose options for change.

We are looking for some key skills and additional capacity, specifically in relation to organisational and leadership development to work as part of the PMO to help develop the next phases of our business cases and to help develop our organisational development strategy and plan to sit aside the change programme. We are also looking for specific support to help develop our senior leaders and help equip them with the skills to lead reform and change of this scale.


There are four main deliverables to these pieces of work:

1. To provide the expert advice, help and coaching to the PMO, change teams and Sefton Staff, so that all business cases include the organisational development activity that will be required to enable the reform.

2. Working with the PMO and Sefton staff, take a lead role in producing the councils overarching organisational development strategy and action plan. The overarching strategy and plan will need to take into account the full suite of reforms and new operating model that the council will be moving into.

3. To support, educate and upskill the organisation to enable the council to successfully deliver the OD strategy and Plan for the council, enabling the cultural change that will be required.

4. To provide a specific and intensive programme of leadership development for the senior team to develop the behaviours, culture and skills required to manage and lead change of this scale.