Transformation of UK Defence’s £150bn military capability programme

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The UK MOD established a major change programme to transfer the ownership and operation of the £150 billion ten-year military capability budget from head office to the individual commands - Navy, Army, Air Force and Joint Forces Command (JFC).

Steve Bannister was brought on board to recruit and lead a team of consultants to drive through the required changes to processes, organisation, tools and technology.

Project background

Following the publication of the Levene report, which set out a series of major recommended improvements to defence capability procurement and support, the Defence Board agreed to the key recommendations, and set itself the target of achieving this major transformation within two years. A key recommendation was to more closely align military capability planning and delivery with the financial management of these activities.

The MOD established an internal programme - the Financial and Military Capability Transformation (FMCT) programme - with a 2 star Finance Director and 2 star General as joint programme directors, and an internal mixed team of civil servants and military officers to deliver the required changes.

It quickly became clear that the FMCT programme would be more likely to succeed with an injection of professional business change expertise and experience. Steve Bannister of Monro Consulting was appointed to recruit and lead a ‘rainbow’ team of transformation, change and process re-engineering consultants. Steve and his team worked hand in hand with the MOD and the services to design and deliver the new integrated approach to financial and military capability management.

Key problems and challenges

The team had to deliver a major programme of organisation and process change across multiple complex, large-scale and geographically dispersed organisations – Navy, Army, Air Force, Joint Forces Command (JFC) and Strategic Programmes.

This had to be achieved in extremely tight timeframes: the new processes had to be designed within three months and then implemented within the remaining five months of the financial year.

Furthermore, this change programme was at the heart of the MOD’s overall portfolio of transformation initiatives, driven out of the recently proposed Levene Defence Reforms, and therefore of strategic importance to the future direction of the department. In particular, the programme’s main aim was to disaggregate the responsibility for the £15bn per annum spend on military capability. That is, to take an existing highly centralised model and distribute the responsibility to each of the four Commands, one of which, JFC, had only recently been established.

Our Solution

Steve’s underlying approach to solving this significant challenge was based on a set of key principles:

Business Architecture: establish an underlying business architecture to provide the foundation for the change. To this end, the team developed a Generic Capability Management (GCM) model that supported an overall Target Operating Model (TOM) for the Financial and Military Capability changes.

Change Agents: assign individual, dedicated change agents to each of the key organisation units, i.e. the four Commands and Strategic Programmes.In this way, the team could establish credibility with each distinct organisation by understanding and resolving their unique issues, whilst ensuring a tight link to the central design authority team.

Management Rigour: apply a rigorous programme and project management approach to the work. For example, the work was broken down into key logical phases and stages, and interdependencies with other work streams were identified and proactively managed.

Practical Guidance: As well as developing traditional operating model design artefacts – including process models, organisation designs and information flow models – the team also developed a set of practical user guides, accessible electronically, which were tested and trialed with the end users before being rolled out to the commands and other users across the MOD.

A further key factor in the success of the programme was the early, intensive and consistent involvement of the user community and senior MOD leadership. The team established a regular drumbeat of monthly, weekly and, in some cases, daily interventions to ensure that the users were actively involved in designing the solution and making sure it would work for their specific circumstances.

Results

Steve and his team delivered all the required outputs on time and under budget. The disaggregation of capability management to the commands successfully achieved initial operating capability (IOC) on time and on budget.

Client testimonial

“The last few years have witnessed one of the biggest shake ups of the governance of defence for several decades. The associated transformational challenge was daunting, and it was immediatelyclear to me that the Ministry of Defence lacked the internal competencies to implement Lord Levene’s recommendations. I felt that we needed a ‘guiding hand’ if we were to have any chance of success on this journey. I looked to Steve Bannister to provide this vital support.

Steve and his team did a great job for me in supporting the design and rollout of new capability management processes and procedures for the Ministry of Defence Head Office in London and for the commands (Navy, Army, Air Force and Joint Forces Command). They played a key role in helping Defence transform its approach to military capability strategy and management. They applied a very structured and disciplined methodology to their work but also demonstrated great flexibility in responding to issues and tackling new requirements head on and as they arose.

Steve has proved a superb facilitator, operator and leader. Working closely to my intent, he forged strong, positive relationships across the department. His team blended extremely well into the user community to ensure they understood and could resolve the unique challenges of each of the different military services.

We are still in the early stages of our journey. But Steve sits amongst a handful of key individuals who have been the architects of a programme which has set the conditions for success”.

Major General Nick Pope – Director Military Capability Transformation

Military Lead for Financial and Military Capability Transformation Programme (FMCT), MOD.