Transformation of UK Defence’s £150bn military capability programme
Following the publication of the Levene report the Defence Board agreed to the key recommendations and set itself the target of achieving this major transformation as quickly as possible. A key recommendation was to more closely align military capability planning and delivery with the financial management of these activities. The Financial and Military Capability Transformation (FMCT) programme was set up to deliver this change.
Steve Bannister of Monro Consulting was appointed to recruit and lead a ‘rainbow’ team of consultants. They worked hand in hand with the MOD and the services to design and deliver the new integrated approach to financial and military capability management.
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Key problems and challenges
The team faced a variety of major challenges:
- to deliver a major programme of organisation and process change across multiple complex, large-scale organisations
- to achieve this in extremely tight timeframes: eight months in total.
- very high visibility and strategic importance – the disaggregation of the £150bn 10-year spend on capability.
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.
- Change Agents: assign individual, dedicated change agents to each of the key organisation units, whilst ensuring a tight link to the central design authority team.
- Management Rigour: apply a rigorous programme and project management approach.
- Practical Guidance: As well as developing traditional operating model artefacts the team also developed a set of practical user guides, accessible online.
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.
“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 immediately clear to me that the Ministry of Defence lacked the internal competencies to implement Lord Levene’s recommendations.
“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 MOD Head Office in London and for the commands – Navy, Army, Air Force and Joint Forces Command.
“Steve has proved a superb facilitator, operator and leader”.
Major General Nick Pope – Director Military Capability Transformation Military Lead for Financial and Military Capability Transformation Programme (FMCT)
MOD