MOD Information Systems and Services · ICT Procurement · 30 staff across 7 teams · Senior military and civilian leadership
18 → 3 months
Approval process compressed
70%
Waste eliminated from procurement workflow
10x
Increase in projects reaching financial approval
98%
Documentation reduced by the people who created it
MOD Information Systems and Services (ISS) was responsible for procuring and sustaining the software and systems underpinning secure global defence communications. With a programme budget in the region of £250m, the organisation employed military officers, civil servants and contractors across multiple sites, with major consultancy firms including McKinsey, Deloitte and KPMG engaged at significant ongoing cost.
On paper, the procurement machinery was working. In practice it was producing the wrong outcomes — slowly, expensively and with increasing disconnection from what the front line actually needed.
The organisation was caught in a cycle that is common in large, complex institutions: doing the wrong things right.
Approval processes ran to 18 months. Teams spent months producing detailed specifications and documentation that decision-makers rarely read in full. Projects were sized to absorb three to five years of career time rather than to deliver capability as quickly as possible. Annual re-justification of funding created permanent instability in long programmes. And the people presenting papers to decision-makers had no access to those decision-makers beforehand — meaning a failed approval could cost another three months before a revised case could be heard.
The result was an organisation that was institutionally expert and genuinely committed, yet systematically unable to deliver complex ICT capability at the pace and cost that defence and security operations demanded.
Major consultancy firms were being paid millions per month to work within this system. Nobody had yet been brought in to challenge the system itself.
The starting point was an honest assessment of what the organisation was actually producing — not what it believed it was producing.
A single diagnostic exercise illustrated the scale of the problem clearly. Key stakeholders were asked to go through their standard documentation with three pens: green for what they read, amber for what they might occasionally consult, red for what they never read or needed. The result was unambiguous. Ninety-eight percent of the documentation was marked red. Years of accumulated process, staffed by creators, influencers and decision-makers at every level, was pure waste — the product of end-to-end value stream mapping that had never been done and assumptions that had never been tested.
From that foundation, a focused intervention was designed and delivered across one directorate and seven teams over 90 days:
Introduced Toyota's A3 methodology to replace months of documentation with a structured three-day process. Teams learned to present the current state, agree the future state and define the delivery plan in direct dialogue with decision-makers rather than through a queue of formal submissions.
Broke the approval bottleneck by getting teams in front of decision-makers before papers were written rather than after. Day one established agreement on the problem; day two on the solution; day three on the plan — compressing 18 months to three.
The green/amber/red exercise reduced standard documentation by 98%, eliminating work that consumed significant staff time at every level without adding value to a single outcome. What remained was genuinely useful.
Advised the 2-star decision-maker to gate ten times more projects by breaking programmes into smaller, fundable milestones rather than pursuing multi-year block approvals. This approach, standard in well-run commercial procurement, increased the volume of projects reaching financial approval ten-fold.
Introduced new metrics at 2-star level to make performance visible and manageable by exception. Approval lead times, project throughput and cost per delivered capability increment became measurable for the first time.
Worked directly with institutionalised teams to show that the processes they treated as fixed constraints were in fact choices — and that the people on the other side of those processes were humans who could be talked to directly. This required an outsider willing to challenge the status quo without fear of the chain of command.
18 → 3 months
Capital approval process
70%
Waste eliminated from procurement workflow
10x
Increase in project financial approvals
98%
Documentation eliminated by the people creating it
50%
Reduction in procurement lead times
10% cheaper
Incremental capability delivery to front line
Thirty people across seven teams proved in 90 days what the organisation had not believed was possible.
Ninety days is enough to prove a new approach works. It is rarely enough to make it permanent.
The teams trained in this programme understood the methods and had seen the results. What they lacked was the seniority, confidence and organisational reach to sustain the challenge once the external voice was removed. The people who needed to hear the message most — those with the authority to change the system permanently — were not consistently in the room.
This is not a criticism of the individuals involved. It is a structural observation. Change of this kind requires sponsorship from the very top of the organisation, not just enthusiasm in the middle. Without it, institutional gravity tends to reassert itself over time.
The lesson is consistent across every programme of this kind: the earlier the most senior leadership is engaged, and the longer the external challenge is sustained, the more durable the results.
The problems ISS faced are not unique to government or defence. They exist in every engineering business that has grown beyond the point where the founder can see everything personally.
Approval processes that take weeks when they should take days. Documentation and reporting that nobody reads but everyone produces. Decisions made by people who never spoke directly to the people doing the work. Capable, committed teams doing the wrong things right because nobody has yet stood outside the system and asked why.
The methods that cut MOD procurement from 18 months to three — A3 thinking, end-to-end value stream mapping, structured decision access, milestone gating — are not complex. They are simply unfamiliar to people inside a system that has never needed to question itself.
An outside perspective, with the right experience and no stake in protecting the existing process, tends to surface those answers quickly.
What is your organisation's version of the 98% that nobody reads but everyone produces?
A focused, no-obligation Strategy Call to identify where time, margin and decision quality are being lost — and what a cleaner system would make possible.
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