Why policy teams should look more like delivery teams

I’ve been thinking about the conditions in which policy teams thrive. In Becoming a Teacher and Teacher Services, we try to bring digital and policy teams together to deliver better outcomes for our users but it’s not always easy.

I’ve concluded that policy teams are more effective when they look a bit more like delivery teams. What do I mean by this?

Delivery teams have regular contact with users, they are held to account for delivering on agreed KPIs, and they have a clear mission. Sometimes, they have more ownership of and accountability for the policy intent of their service than their nearest policy team.

Take the following example: a policy team is charged with delivering a programme of work. They chunk it up into smaller pieces of work. One piece of work might be ownership of a relationship with an important stakeholder, another might be ownership of guidance and communications, and a third might be delivery of a digital service to support the programme. In this instance, it’s probably the digital team that is going to have the clearest mission, accountability and KPIs. Who is responsible for making sure the policy is delivering on its intent? The SRO can point to the digital team and ask them how the number of sign ups, submissions, claims, or whatever it might be, is looking. In this model, the policy team has lost ownership of the outcomes they were charged with delivering.

How do we solve this?

We need to be clear who policy people are.

Unfortunately, in the civil service, the “policy lead” is sometimes just ‘the person who’s been around a long time’ or the person who doesn’t have another profession (ie — they are not a developer, or a user researcher or a contract manager). As policy people, we should be clearer about our skills, our role and our expertise. It is important work, and not everyone can do it.

We can learn from our Digital counterparts here. They have clearer expectations of the skills members of each discipline should show at each level, and these are tested at interview — a researcher seeking promotion might be asked to show a recent research plan, a developer will be asked to do a tech test. These sorts of tasks are still inconsistent at policy interviews.

Policy teams need to be organised around a clear mission

There are policy teams whose mission is to own a piece of guidance or a relationship with a stakeholder. This is bad. These teams do not have a clear goal other than ‘deliver the contract’ or ‘speak to X stakeholder’. Their incentives are to deliver the thing they have always delivered, not to ensure it is meeting its policy intent. Every team should have a mission, and that mission should be expressed in terms that make sense for their users. They may pull any number of levers to deliver that mission (a contract, a stakeholder relationship, a piece of guidance) but the lever is not the mission in itself. This is the opposite of how Digital teams are set up to work. The content function’s role isn’t to churn out content, it’s to get more users successfully through the journey they own by clearly showing what’s needed at each stage. User needs, and outcomes, drive every decision.

That mission ought to have KPIs attributed to it, and those ought to be shared by relevant delivery teams

If my policy team’s mission is to recruit more chartered surveyors, my delivery team’s mission ought to be the same. That is where you get proper collaboration between policy and delivery.

A shared mission should also mean shared ownership of what the data is showing us. Digital teams are victims of their own success here. Because they have, and expose, data on user behaviour, they are held accountable for it. SROs ought to be able to hold policy teams to account for the behaviour their policy is driving. I have been in some excellent conversations between SROs and digital delivery teams, where teams have been probed on which numbers are going up or down, and what they’re doing about it. I would like to go to more meetings with policy teams and their SROs where this happens.

Policy teams might counter that they can’t have these types of conversations with SROs as they don’t have access to the same type of data on user behaviour and performance. My argument would be that these teams have been set up in the wrong way, without clear, measurable outcomes to which they are working. Having an outcome to which you are working, and a way of regularly measuring progress, also makes policy evaluation — which is too often a bolt-on — an inevitable part of delivery, baked into how the team works. If — halfway through delivery — you’re trying to work out what you’ll measure and how you’ll measure it, your chances of successfully delivering value are very limited.

Delivery levers should all be in the same place, and teams should have autonomy to pull them as needed

If you need to deliver a payment, a new service or a change to guidance in order to deliver on your policy intent, you should be able to do that without trying to negotiate with a team that has a different set of incentives and mission. Levers and policy intent ought to be in the same place, and without this there can be no true accountability or empowerment.

If I — for example — manage a payment, but I am not part of the team that owns the policy for who receives that payment and why, I am ultimately disempowered. I cannot act on things that I see that would make my process more effective for my users.

Policy teams that have a clear, user-centred mission, are accountable for a set of related KPIs, and own all the levers that allow them to deliver on that mission are more effective. They are also happier, because it is more rewarding to be held to account for delivering more chartered surveyors than for delivering a process.

Here’s an example of how I have seen it work well. A multidisciplinary team, which combines policy, delivery, engagement and other specialisms, spots an issue with the process by which references are collected for trainee teachers. This process is hampering their shared mission: encouraging more people to become teachers. The policy team is empowered to make a decision about the purpose of references in the teacher recruitment process, and to more clearly define the policy intent of this part of the application. They can work with the delivery team to redesign the process so that it better meets this policy intent. From the beginning, the team knows what it is trying to achieve and how it will measure whether it’s achieved it. In this instance, the policy and delivery team are working together toward a shared mission, and the policy team can own the intent of the work, and be held to account for its delivery.

I should finish by saying that I am not claiming to be an oracle on effective policy making. Many people have lots more experience of this than me. But, I have worked in policy teams whose role was ‘to do policy’ and I have worked in policy teams whose role was ‘to deliver more teachers’. I have worked in teams where the levers for delivering our outcome were embedded in the team, and I have worked with others where teams are organised around a process or an activity rather than an outcome. In my experience, more was delivered for users and for government when policy teams had a clear and measurable outcome they were trying to achieve, and were empowered to do so. In other words, when they looked more like delivery teams.