Case Study: Public Sector Digital Transformation

The Situation

A local authority needed to digitise its citizen facing services as part of a wider efficiency programme. The organisation was running on legacy systems that were expensive to maintain, difficult to integrate, and unable to support modern service delivery. Five directorates were involved, each with different systems, processes, and levels of digital maturity. Previous digitisation attempts had failed because they were technology led rather than service led, resulting in systems that staff did not use and citizens could not navigate.

What Elisabeth Did

Elisabeth was brought in as the programme manager to deliver the transformation across all five directorates. She structured the programme around service design rather than technology procurement, ensuring that every digital service was designed from the citizen's perspective before technology decisions were made.

She established a programme governance framework that brought all five directorates together under a single programme board with shared objectives and transparent reporting. She managed the vendor relationships for the digital platform, the integration middleware, and the legacy system decommissioning, coordinating these suppliers under a unified delivery plan.

Change management was embedded as a core workstream from day one. Elisabeth worked with each directorate to identify change champions, develop training programmes tailored to different user groups, and build feedback mechanisms that allowed the programme to adapt based on real user experience during the rollout.

The Results

• 12 citizen services fully digitised and operational
• Legacy systems decommissioned across all five directorates
• Staff adoption rate of 94 percent within three months of go live
• Citizen satisfaction scores improved by 31 percent
• Annual operational cost reduction of 22 percent
• Programme delivered on time and within the approved budget