Regulation · Target operating model design
Moving a 1,400-person regulator from silos to a profession-led model
An enterprise operating-model redesign built around capability, flexible deployment and clear ownership.
- Sector
- Regulation
- Scope
- Enterprise-wide operating model · 1,400+ people
- Service
- Target operating model design
01 — The challenge
The organisation was structured around traditional directorate silos. That shape had served it while work was more uniform, but increasingly restricted its ability to respond as regulatory demands diversified.
Specialist capability was duplicated, deployment was inflexible and ownership of key capabilities was not always clear where decisions needed to be made. Leadership needed a profession-led structure in which capability, rather than directorate boundary, shaped how expertise was deployed — without losing delivery momentum during transition.
The evolution
Strong directorate accountability and deep specialist expertise, but with capability duplicated and people difficult to deploy across organisational boundaries.
Profession-led capability ownership, with expertise deployed more flexibly against changing priorities while retaining clear delivery accountability.
02 — The approach
- Advised the executive team on the shape, sequencing and trade-offs of the change.
- Designed the profession-led structure, including capability groupings, ownership and the relationship between professions, directorates and services.
- Built a practical implementation roadmap that treated transition as a managed sequence rather than a single go-live event.
- Defined supporting governance, data and automation so capability owners could operate the model rather than rely on legacy escalation routes.
03 — The outcome
The model created greater flexibility in how people and expertise could be deployed, clearer ownership of capability and a more responsive basis for matching people to changing demand.
The work connected executive decisions, organisation design and implementation planning so the future state was designed to operate in practice, not merely to look coherent on paper.
Anonymised case study.