Why Change and Digital Transformations in the Public Sector Fail
The UK is spending billions on digital transformation programmes. Too often, they’re not working. Here’s the conversation we need to have about people.
There’s no shortage of ambition in public sector transformation right now. From charity digitisation to council service redesigns, from central government AI pilots to local authority restructures, the pressure to do better, for less has never been greater.
And yet, the track record is sobering.
Of the 22 major government IT transformation projects currently being assessed for delivery confidence, only four are rated as highly likely to succeed. Legacy systems are costing the taxpayer an estimated £45 billion annually in lost productivity.
Public satisfaction with digital public services has dropped from 79% to 68% over the past decade. And half of all digital and data roles in government were unfilled in 2024, largely because salaries can’t compete with the private sector.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Transformation Failure
When a transformation programme stalls or fails, the post-mortem usually points at the usual suspects: the technology didn’t work as promised, the budget ran out, the scope was too ambitious.
And while those things may all be true, they’re often symptoms of a more fundamental issue, the wrong people were hired to lead and deliver the change.
Research from ArvatoConnect found that nearly three-quarters of public sector decision-makers admitted their transformation strategies were being driven by available technology rather than by what their organisations or citizens actually needed.
That’s not a technology procurement failure, that’s a leadership and capability failure. Someone, somewhere, wasn’t asking the right questions because they didn’t know what the right questions were.
The National Audit Office has been saying a version of this for years. Programmes initiated without adequate skills and resources in place are at high risk of delay, descoping or outright failure. The NAO’s guidance is blunt: organisations must critically assess their available capabilities, and design implementation plans around what they actually have, not what they assume they have, or hope they’ll hire in later.
Too often, that honest assessment doesn’t happen. Transformation roles get filled by capable people who’ve done something adjacent, rather than specialists who’ve done the actual thing.
What Change and Transformation Recruitment Actually Involves
There’s a difference between hiring someone who can manage a project and hiring someone who can lead change. Both matter, but they’re not the same.
A project manager will track milestones, manage risk registers, and keep stakeholders updated. A change leader will navigate political resistance, shift deeply embedded cultures, bring sceptical staff on a journey, and hold the line when pressure mounts to revert to the old way.
In the public sector, where organisational memory is long, trade union relationships are complex, and political cycles create short-termism, that second skill set is rarer and more valuable than most hiring managers appreciate.
Effective change and transformation recruitment in the public sector means looking for a specific combination of attributes.
Sector Literacy
Understanding how public bodies actually make decisions such as procurement constraints, governance structures, Ministerial pressures, public accountability, is non-negotiable.
Candidates who’ve only operated commercially will often underestimate how much this matters and pay for it later.
Change Credibility
Has this person actually delivered change, not just consulted on it or supported someone else delivering it, but owned a programme through from design to embedded outcome?
The distinction matters enormously, and it’s easy to miss in an interview.
Resilience Under Ambiguity
Public sector transformation rarely runs to plan. The best people in these roles are comfortable making decisions with incomplete information, adjusting course without losing stakeholder confidence and sustaining momentum when political winds shift.
Stakeholder Range
A good transformation hire in the public sector needs to be as comfortable presenting to a Board or Select Committee as they are running a workshop with frontline staff. The breadth of stakeholder management required is genuinely unusual.
Why This Is Getting Harder
The talent pool for genuinely experienced public sector transformation professionals is not growing fast enough to meet demand. The pipeline of people who’ve delivered meaningful change, in charities and not for profit organisations, local government, central government, blue light services is finite, and competition for them is intensifying.
At the same time, the public sector’s ability to compete on salary is structurally limited. That’s not new, but it’s becoming more acute as transformation roles in the private sector attract ever-higher packages.
The result is a growing capability gap: organisations that need specialist talent most are often least equipped to attract it through traditional means.
This is where a deep sector network and a genuine understanding of what motivates public sector professionals become critical. Many of the best people in this space aren’t actively job-hunting. They’re embedded in programmes, well-networked, and unlikely to surface through a standard job board search.
Finding them and making a compelling case for a new challenge requires relationships, not just reach.
Getting the Brief Right
One of the most common mistakes we see is organisations going to market with a brief that doesn’t reflect what they need.
A job description built around a previous postholder or copied from a comparable role in a different context, often attracts the wrong candidates. Transformation roles are inherently contextual, for example: a Director of Change who excelled in an NHS trust restructure may not be the right fit for a technology-led efficiency programme in a local authority, and vice versa.
Getting the brief right means being honest about the specific challenge: what’s the political landscape, where is resistance likely to come from, what does success look like in 12 months, and what kind of person has successfully navigated this kind of environment before? That conversation before the search starts is where the quality of the eventual hire is determined.
The Cost of Getting It Wrong
A failed transformation programme is expensive in every sense. There’s the direct financial cost of delayed delivery, wasted investment and consultant fees to diagnose what went wrong.
There’s the reputational cost, internally to staff who’ve lived through another failed initiative, and externally to people and politicians.
And there’s the opportunity cost: another cycle lost, another chance to genuinely improve public services missed.
The right hire won’t guarantee success. Transformation is complex, and even the best people operate within constraints they can’t fully control. But the wrong hire will almost certainly contribute to failure and in a sector where public money and public trust are at stake, that’s a cost no organisation can afford to take lightly.
A Different Kind of Hiring Conversation
What this all points to is the need for a more substantive conversation at the start of any transformation hiring process. Not just “what does this role look like?” but “what does this organisation actually need to deliver this change, and what kind of person has done that before?”
Those questions require genuine sector knowledge to answer well. Understanding the difference between charities, NFPs and local government cultures, central government programme governance and arm’s-length body dynamics, or a technology-led transformation and a structural reorganisation, that contextual literacy is what separates a useful search partner from a transactional recruiter.
Public sector transformation is one of the most complex and important challenges in UK public life right now. The people hired to lead it deserve to be found, assessed, and placed with that seriousness in mind.
How Practicus Can Support You
If you’re navigating a transformation hiring challenge in the public sector and want a frank conversation about what you need, our public sector team works with organisations across central government, local authorities, charities, and beyond. We’d be glad to help.
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