At Leapwise, we work regularly with police forces, local government, and others to support transformation programmes that improve public services. You might have seen our recent blog talking about that kind of work with Norfolk and Suffolk Constabularies, or our VICTORY framework for major change.
With policing under pressure from all directions – whether through successive tough financial settlements, increasingly complex demand, or a new devolution landscape – this type of transformation work is more important than ever.
In this ‘external voices’ Leapwise blog, we asked Dennis Murray QPM – Thames Valley Police Assistant Chief Constable for Legitimacy and Public Value – to give his expert perspective. After leading a major force review in 2023 that delivered significant savings, he knows what it takes to make a transformation programme a success.
4 Lessons for Leading a Major Transformation Programme – ACC Dennis Murray’s View
Throughout my career in policing, I’ve had the chance to work across high-performing and diverse forces in complex change roles.
At Northamptonshire Police – the force I started out at – I led one of the earliest attempts to bring fire and policing together to drive savings and better outcomes. I was also in charge of the force move from our existing HQ, something which proved much more complicated than it might seem! And with the British Transport Police, I engaged widely with the police workforce and the public in my post, focusing on trust and community policing.
In all that work, including my current projects at Thames Valley, I feel that I’ve brought a perspective that may be pretty unique for a senior officer today.
Unlike many of my peers, I spent 17 years as a PC before I went for my first promotion. While I sometimes wish I’d pushed on sooner, all that frontline experience gave me a powerful insight into what change feels like at the sharp end. I’ve been that officer on the frontline going: ‘Why don’t the bosses know that things are so tough?’ It’s made me a much more empathetic leader in my strategic change work.
Leading Thames Valley’s Force Restructure Programme
In Spring 2022, Thames Valley Police initiated a Force Review. This would feed into a bigger Force Restructure Programme one year later. Leapwise offered us some really valuable help early on in figuring out the scope, programme design, and team capabilities needed to make it work successfully.
This force restructure was genuinely ambitious. Given budget constraints (which have affected all of us in policing), our goal was to save £20.4m over 3 years and restructure parts of our organisation worth £550m. We were also aiming to reduce our local policing areas down from 11, all while trying to minimise disruption internally and give a good service to our different communities.
I recognised how challenging this could all prove to be. Thames Valley hadn’t delivered a force review for over 13 years and we didn’t have all the skills and knowledge ‘ready to go’ for a transformation programme of this size and complexity. With my long experience at the frontline, I also knew that this type of change can be anxiety-inducing. ‘Restructure’ can immediately make officers and staff jump to thoughts of redundancies or pay constraints, even though that wasn’t our focus.
4 lessons for leading a major transformation programme
With all that in mind, I knew we could make this programme a success. And ultimately, we did. Here’s how.
Lesson 1: Lock in a clear scope upfront
When you’re trying to deliver anything in a big, complex organisation, it’s essential that you set a clear scope for what you want to do. In Thames Valley, we worked with Leapwise to get that vision statement and scope done early, while also trying to learn from other forces.
That might seem obvious, but it’s absolutely crucial. With the pressures of other day-to-day work and the need to ‘get on with it’, it can be easy to skip over this step and set off without knowing where you’re headed.
Further down the line, you inevitably pay the price for this strategic uncertainty by putting effort in the wrong places or missing key areas of focus entirely. It also risks undermining confidence in your team if you can’t explain what you’re trying to do.
Lesson 2: Build your team early around a common vision
A vision’s important, but it can’t lead to a successful project without an effective team built around it. Even though the force hadn’t delivered a programme like this for many years, we were able to stand up a project team and get them aligned with our vision quickly. That offered enormous benefits.
Here’s another example of the same thing. One of the goals of our Force Restructure Programme was to bring down the number of policing areas from 11 to 5 (after looking at other options that might also meet our goals). That was a big change and one that needed careful management.
For that reason, we brought in the leaders for those areas early too, making sure we knew who the relevant superintendents and chief superintendents in those places would be well before we actioned final changes. When we made this big transition, that meant those leaders knew what they needed to do to make it a success, and it also helped us refine our messaging to the wider workforce as early as possible.
Lesson 3: Engage broadly and listen well
For a major transformation programme, that ability to build support among the workforce and beyond is one of the defining ways to ensure success. With our programme team in place, we worked really hard in Thames Valley to engage with the public, the police workforce, local chief executives, youth offending services, and all manner of other important local partners.
However, it’s not just about ‘speaking to’ others. Listening is crucial. A good example of this was when we were thinking about combining some neighbourhood roles with youth offending ones. Because of those strong relationships with partners, we engaged and quickly found out that this just wouldn’t work as we’d envisaged. We changed course and ended up with better outcomes.
We also worked hard to show the workforce that this programme wasn’t about cuts or redundancies. In fact, I was really proud that we managed the full £20m savings programme with just one (voluntary) redundancy. But without that constant communication with the workforce, it would have been natural for people to feel anxious or for rumours to take hold.
Lesson 4: Evaluate as independently as you can
To run our programme, we didn’t always have every resource that we needed. That meant we had to make sensible compromises, even if they weren’t ideal. In one case, we decided to let a command (partly) run their own review of how they were operating. While it solved a problem in one way, it’s not something I’d do again.
Why? Well, though I don’t doubt the recommendations of the staff who did that review, there’s a natural tension in working that way. The team involved were emotionally invested in the work they were doing and, therefore, they were offering views that reflected that feeling. It must have been difficult for them to focus on a ‘best value’ approach of what was the right place to cut and what was the right place to reinvest, but they did an amazing job. The change I would add is a joint change team/business approach, even if it took a little longer.
Managing through change
Ultimately, we led this work to a successful conclusion thanks to the people in my change team. They went the extra mile to deliver well thought-out recommendations and make my job much easier when it came to decision-making. We made the savings we needed with no compulsory job losses at all and with smooth implementation around many big changes. We were also able to make smart decisions – like putting in 25 new sergeants to support a young in-service workforce – that helped performance in the long-run.
Having spent a lot of time at the frontline, I know how disruptive change can feel. It has to be managed well and managed transparently. That’s the responsibility on those working at the top of policing today.
You can read more about Leapwise’s work with Thames Valley Police in our case study blog. To learn more about managing complex change programmes, you can reach Dennis on LinkedIn or speak to the Leapwise team via the button below.
