Lancia Consult supports discovery phase for operating model transformation
A government department commissioned a service-led transformation to strengthen a national environmental regulator’s planning service. Lancia Consult supported the discovery phase, which established a clear view of the current state and helped define the strategic direction of the multi-year transformation programme.
To accelerate land development through reformed planning processes, a central UK government department commissioned a transformation of the operating model for an environmental regulator’s planning service.
At the time, the service was under sustained pressure from regulatory change, political expectations, and high delivery demand. This had affected its ability to consistently fulfil its role as an environmental regulator and expert contributor within the planning system.
Alongside the immediate need to stabilise and improve service delivery for both internal teams and external stakeholders, the programme also served as a pilot for service-led transformation, aligning with a wider cross-government shift towards service-based operating models.
The project
Lancia Consult was brought in to support a detailed current-state assessment of the planning service, as well as an organisation-wide readiness assessment for service-led transformation.
Working as part of the organisation’s Service Transformation team, the consulting firm supported the mapping of core end-to-end business services, covering around 40 processes and sub-processes. This exercise helped identify bottlenecks, handovers, decision points, and opportunities for improvement.
The mapping was underpinned by extensive qualitative input, including in-depth interviews with more than 30 senior leaders, operational staff, and external stakeholders. In addition, five regional workshops were held to gather, test and validate user insights.
These qualitative findings were combined with quantitative analysis and the organisation’s existing operating model to build an evidence-based view of the current state. The discovery phase concluded with a senior-led visioning workshop, which established a shared direction of travel and laid the foundations for future end-to-end service design as part of the wider transformation programme.
In parallel, Lancia Consult supported the Service Transformation team with vendor management and organisation-wide dependency mapping. This included overseeing a third-party supplier conducting process mining of the organisation’s case management system, ensuring data-led insights were grounded in operational reality.
Lancia Consult was also engaged to review the wider change portfolio across the government department, identifying and categorising dependencies linked to the service transformation. This helped support risk management and improved reporting to senior programme stakeholders.
The outcome
The Service Transformation team delivered a comprehensive current-state assessment of the planning service, alongside an organisation-wide readiness assessment for service-led transformation. The outputs set out the key pressures and constraints across people, processes, systems and data architecture, and provided a clear set of recommendations aligned with both service requirements and the organisation’s appetite for change.
