Competency: Changing and Improving

Question:

Tell me about a project you were involved with which delivered successfully. What obstacles did you encounter and how did you overcome them?

Your Answer:

Situation / Introduction

In my role as secretariat with DCMS for finance I successfully managed to double the department’s capacity to give answers for funding to our arm’s lengths bodies via the creation on an Investment sub committee. 

Task / Problem

I realised most months there was not the time or capacity to have all the business cases from arms length bodies (museums, uk sport etc) to attend the committee and be reviewed by our experts and given an answer on their funding request from the board members. 

Action

This amount of time it took for business cases to come to committee was causing a lot of concern and frustration for our ALBs and get answers to their funding requests. I took the initiative and asked all ALBs to write to me with their concerns which I would share with the director. Once I had this in writing I set up a meeting with the director and deputy director to discuss this problem from the point of view of the ALBs which i was the point of contact for and to brainstorm solutions. In this meeting, i came up with the suggestion that we create a sub-committee where ALBs funding requests for £15 million and under could be reviewed with the deputy director as the chair. 

Result

The director and deputy director agreed to my suggestion. The investment subcommittee was created which reduced the waiting time significantly for business cases to come to the committee as we doubled capacity. The ALBs were very pleased and i learned that when there is a problem it is a good idea to get feedback from those concerned and present new ideas based on that to senior management.