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Designing success: a function-first approach
Be clear about what you are trying to achieve before you commit to the staff structure to deliver it
INNOVATION & IMPROVEMENT
Alistair Sharpe-Neal
Director, Campbell Tickell
Alistair Sharpe-Neal
Director, Campbell Tickell
Issue 82 | February 2026
Service leaders face constant pressure to deliver more with fewer resources, leading to repeated reviews of structures and staffing that often produce only marginal gains, while leaving entrenched, siloed ways of working untouched and limiting real innovation and wider service improvements.
Structures often evolve over multiple iterations for reasons of expediency rather than a clear understanding of what they are there to deliver, which can easily become obscured.
Form before function
‘Form before function' is an oft-quoted maxim, but how do you harness it as an approach to drive impactful change without enduring an ‘ocean boiling' transformation?
Here are some steps to achieve this:
- Be clear about your service offer and how people approach and navigate your services – mapping and understanding behaviours, touch points, and pain points.
- Track and understand what drives service demand and in turn the flow of work through a service. This will baseline the level of delivery capacity needed and measure the impact of digital shift and AI initiatives.
- Tip processes delivered within operational silos on their side and see how they can be realigned end-to-end or as a whole-system approach, to design out complexity and duplication.
- Establish accountability for outcomes, with performance and satisfaction measures focused on impact rather than effort.
- Rescope leadership and delivery roles to be more open, promote transferable skills development and flexible working.
A service blueprint or target operating model can be used to encapsulate the benefits of a bold new functional design – better aligned, simplified and flexible, to engage stakeholders, leaders, and frontline staff.
Resulting operational structures, based on an understanding of function, will be better aligned to the priority needs of service users and will be based on a fuller understanding of the capacity and skills sets needed, with shared measures of success and accountability for them.
“Through a function-first approach, a flexible and optimised structure will quickly emerge, capable of delivering lasting value.”
“This collaborative approach has resulted in the development of a target operating model, with the service response fully aligned to the key demand drivers of homelessness.”
Case study: Tower Hamlets Homelessness and Housing Options service
A strong advocate of this approach is Jennifer Wynter, who became Director of the Homelessness and Housing Options service at Tower Hamlets Council in July 2025. This frontline service addresses complex housing needs, and faces rapidly escalating demand, which in turn has driven an unsustainable level of cost in the provision of short-term accommodation solutions for people with a statutory housing need.
Jennifer recognised that to deliver a sustainable, strengths-based service, her priority was to establish a baseline understanding of demand drivers, what a resident experiences in approaching and navigating the service, and the effectiveness of the service’s response. To support this approach, Jennifer enlisted Campbell Tickell to work with her and her senior team, managers and frontline staff, to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the service, in refocusing on resident need, and building a service culture emphasising, transparency, honesty and compassion.
This collaborative approach has resulted in the development of a target operating model, with the service response fully aligned to the key demand drivers of homelessness, such as family exclusion and tenancy termination; with a trauma-informed approach to first contact, triage, assessment and case management, while strengthening statutory duty decision-making.
Jennifer believes that this blueprint will enable her service to ‘transform the way we work based on clarity of understanding of our operating environment, and how we respond, in an innovative and cost-effective way, through phased and collaborative change with colleagues in adults, children’s, health, and our community sectors, to end homelessness and rough sleeping’.
Be clear about what you are trying to achieve before you commit to the structure to deliver it. Through a function-first approach, a flexible and optimised structure will quickly emerge, capable of delivering lasting value.
This article first appeared in Housing Today.
