2007 Capability Reviews
Capability Reviews were a direct consequence of the drive for delivery in Labour’s second term. They were conceived by Gus O’Donnell, Cabinet Secretary, as the way to hold departmental leaders to account for improving their departments’ capability to deliver.
The extensive process of engagement and operating model that underpinned the reform immediately gave it traction in Whitehall.
The Capability Reviews were the first organisational capability assessment framework in the UK systematically to assess the organisational capabilities of individual departments and to publish results that could be compared across departments.
The reviews came to be seen as robust primarily because they applied the model consistently across all departments and allowed for comparison between them.
This focused the attention of permanent secretaries on the relative strengths and weaknesses within their departments, and injected a degree of competition, which acted as a constant pressure for improvement: ‘Without the scores, they wouldn’t have listened.’
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By the end of 2009, all major departments were re-reviewed and it was reported that 95% of areas that were assessed in the baseline reviews as needing urgent development had been addressed. In particular, progress was reported in terms of leadership, notably in the capability and effectiveness of top leadership teams, and in strategy, with departments improving the way they used evidence and analysis in policy making.
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The reviews directly led to the creation of the civil service staff engagement survey, which exposed key capability gaps without having to rely on a high-level external review.
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However, by 2010 the loss of key reform leaders and the failure to reinvent what was only ever designed as a time-limited intervention led to the eventual watering down of the reviews. All the most effective elements of the reform design were abandoned with the move to self-assessment and, later, departmental improvement planning.
Other resources
We put a lot of effort into communication and telling the story about why we were doing reviews, how they had been developed collaboratively, and what it was like doing one. These two videos were used for induction of reviewers and wider communications. The first captures the final stages of co-design: the two day workshop at Woking. The second was filmed during two of the first 3 reviews - interviewing reviewers from inside and outside the civil service and senior leaders from within the departments being reviewed.