Public services face relentless pressure. The national agenda stretches from supporting small businesses to tackling knife crime and on to improving access to health and social care, with all under intense public and ministerial scrutiny.
This year’s Programme of the Year submissions highlighted some of the innovative ways civil servants are rising to these challenges. Three themes consistently emerged: human-led design, modern digital and agile methodologies, and deep cross-boundary collaboration. Together, they form a practical guide for overcoming traditional delivery obstacles and accelerating progress across government.
Human-led programme design that creates lasting change
PA delivery expert Alexandra McNicol
Across submissions, we noticed a decisive shift away from programmes that impose predefined outcomes and toward those that iteratively designed – guided by real people at the centre. When teams base decisions on lived experience, particularly for vulnerable or marginalised groups, they create solutions that achieve measurable and lasting impact for individuals and the wider system.
Prisoners Building Homes (PBH) demonstrates the power of this approach. The programme trains prisoners and people on probation to build modular, low-carbon homes on public land – providing safe housing for vulnerable communities. Every element of the PBH delivery model is shaped around the needs of prisoners: accredited construction training, tailored employment support, and critically, a living wage for those on day release so that they can avoid the financial pressures that often drive reoffending. In its pilot, the programme trained more than 100 individuals, 89 percent of whom secured employment on release, and reoffending fell to zero percent, down from a national average of 35 percent.
The lesson for programme leaders is clear: those who focus relentlessly on people and purpose, rather than on delivering a single predefined solution, unlock far greater value for a far wider group of people.
Breaking from traditional delivery with agile, digital-first innovation
PA delivery expert Katie Crookbain
Against a backdrop of rising demands and shrinking timelines, programme teams are moving beyond traditional project management and using technology, data, and agile ways of working to drive impact.
The UK Government’s decommissioning of the 30-year-old Customs Handling of Income and Export Freight (CHIEF) system provides a compelling example of how this can be done. It involved replacing a 30-year-old legacy platform while ensuring zero disruption to UK border operations – a huge undertaking requiring skill and care. With no blueprint to follow, the team coordinated the decommissioning of 96 interconnected systems, undertaking extensive stakeholder engagement, technical workshops and meticulous planning. This achievement delivered £28 million in annual IT cost savings, modernised essential customs infrastructure and avoided costly IT upgrades. As a result, the system has processed over 5 million monthly customs declarations, secured £11 billion in annual excise duty and supported more than 150 systems and processes across HMRC and government.
This approach works best when discovery continues throughout the programme; when technical specialists guide decisions from day one; and when teams design for integration and incremental testing rather than large, high-stakes transitions.
And, at a time of considerable conversation around how best to obtain value from AI, it was encouraging to read how other programmes were doing just this. One nominee – called out as an exemplar programme by the Prime Minister – was reducing turnaround times for end users where the application of AI was genuinely leading to life-improving and life-extending outcomes.
Unifying government and industry for system-wide delivery
PA delivery expert Shaun Delaney
Today’s delivery challenges rarely sit neatly within departmental boundaries. Successful programmes must now rely on shared goals, unified decision-making, and joint accountability.
We can take inspiration from HMP Millsike, the UK’s first all-electric prison. Delivered as part of the government’s plan to create 14,000 new prison places by 2031, it succeeded in an environment where projects often run over budget, over schedule or both. HMP Millsike did the opposite by aligning partners behind one mission and sharing ownership of delivery risks from the outset.
During the 12-month mobilisation period, HMPPS established close partnerships with the prison’s facilities management provider and construction team – delivering 5,000 actions across 17 workstreams, while setting new environmental standards.
The result: a major infrastructure project delivered on time and 15 million pounds under budget, with the first prisoners received ahead of schedule. The programme also generated more than 150 million pounds of economic value locally and created around 800 jobs, including 73 for ex-offenders.
This level of deep alignment reminds us of the mobilisation of the UK Ventilator Challenge, when government, industry and regulators were brought together to deliver more than 30,000 devices in eight weeks. The difference today is that this calibre of partnership is becoming part of everyday delivery rather than something reserved for crises. Cross-boundary delivery works when teams establish shared goals early, maintain joint ownership of risks and connect delivery and operations long before go-live.
It's not just stakeholders that benefit from being brought closer together. Data is another powerful enabler. One nomination described how a cross-government transformation programme brought together dozens of securely linked data projects across several organisations to drive efficiencies and improve lives. Crucially, this model was one-third the cost of distributed alternatives, and is scalable across government.
The new rulebook: Setting the standard for future government delivery
This year’s submissions show that modern public service delivery is no longer judged solely by completing a project on time and on budget, but by whether it creates sustainable positive change. The programmes recognised here demonstrate that meaningful public value is delivered when services are built around citizens, when teams embrace digital and agile methods and when government and industry work as one system.
These teams show what it takes to deliver progress at pace and scale. Their achievements signal a new chapter for public service delivery, where momentum matters just as much as milestones, and where the end of a project is not a finish line but the starting point for long-term impact.