Strategy, Design and Change: The Work Behind Ireland's Public Sector Transformation

Ireland's public sector reform programme has reached a critical phase. Over the past three years, the Government has put in place a coherent set of strategies. Digital Ireland: Connecting our People, Securing our Future sets the national vision through to 2030. Connecting Government 2030 sets out how the public service will modernise. The Action Plan for Designing Better Public Services positions design thinking as a core discipline of public service reform.

With those frameworks in place, the implementation work begins.

The Implementation Challenge

Connecting Government 2030 explicitly identifies new ways of working and a human-driven digital experience as priority action areas. The Action Plan for Designing Better Public Services treats design thinking as a way of creating services that resonate with people's needs, harnessing technology to meet those needs and aligning the capabilities and resources of public service organisations across Ireland. Both commitments belong to the more difficult side of reform. [Source: Eolas Magazine, Connecting Government 2030 analysis]

Capacity and Capability

The challenge for the organisations responsible for delivery is twofold. The first is internal capacity. Public bodies, agencies and government-funded organisations are operating at full pace already, and adding transformation work on top of business as usual creates pressure on teams that tend to be stretched.

The second is the discipline of design and change itself. KPMG's analysis of public sector reform found that organisations focusing only on processes and technology in their digital programmes rarely achieve the outcomes they need. Building services around how people use them, and changing how teams work to support those services, requires expertise that takes time to develop in-house. [Source: KPMG, The Future of the Public Sector, 2023]

What Integrated Reform Looks Like in Practice

The HSE's Healthy Eating Active Living Programme is one Irish example of how this work translates into practice. In designing a physical activity pathway across the public health system, the programme combined a structured change management approach with co-design involving health professionals, service planners, Local Sports Partnerships, Sport Ireland and members of the public. Behaviour change theory was used as the underpinning framework to analyse stakeholder insights and prioritise components of the service design. Integrated work of this kind, holding strategy, design, change and behavioural insight together in a single coherent process, is increasingly what serious public sector reform requires. [Source: National College of Ireland, HSE HEAL Programme case study]

We have seen the same pattern in our own engagements. At Atlantic Technological University, our multi-campus student experience programme combined research across more than 1,600 students and staff with co-designed personas, journey maps and 46 prioritised SMART goals, with pilot programmes live within four weeks of completion. With a regional development agency, a whole-organisation strategic thinking engagement brought every team into the work of setting direction, so the resulting strategy moved into delivery with ownership already in place. In both cases, strategy, design and change ran as a single integrated process rather than as separate workstreams handed between teams.

What the Best Reform Programmes Have in Common

What we have seen across our work in third-level education, public bodies and funded research environments is that organisations managing reform well share a few characteristics. Design and user research happens at the start of an engagement. Change management is given the same rigour as programme management. Strategy, design and change sit with the same team, through the same engagement, from initiation to delivery.

Where Red Mountain Fits

Red Mountain works at this intersection. We bring together strategy, service design and organisational change for public bodies, agencies, third-level institutions and funded research organisations across Ireland. Working with Atlantic Technological University on a recent strategic design process for online and flexible learning, ATU's Head of Innovation, Online, Flexible and Professional Development, Gavin Clinch, described the team as having "a knack for connecting the dots and keeping everyone focused on achieving meaningful outcomes."

The frameworks behind Ireland's public sector reform programme are among the strongest in Europe. What determines whether the country realises the reform it has invested in is the work that converts strategy into changed practice. That is the work Red Mountain was built to do.