How to fix broken systems - Kate Tarling (CEO, The Service Group)

What It Covers

Kate Tarling, CEO of The Service Group and author of *The Service Organisation*, explains how large organizations can fix broken service delivery systems by reorienting around customer outcomes, restructuring investment portfolios, and building cross-functional leadership — without requiring a full organizational overhaul before seeing results.

Key Questions Answered

• •Status quo risk: Treating the current operating model as the "safe, neutral option" is the primary mistake large organizations make. The status quo carries real, measurable costs — duplication, slow decisions, invisible risk — and any transformation business case must start by quantifying what inaction is already costing, not just what change might risk.
• •Start with one vertical service: Rather than attempting organization-wide transformation, identify one end-to-end service that cuts across technology, operations, compliance, and legal functions. Map what good looks like for that service, align cross-functional teams around shared outcomes, and extract lessons before scaling the approach across the broader organization.
• •Portfolio remapping over new budget: Roughly 80% of transformation work involves redirecting existing investment, not securing new budget. Map all current projects against actual services in plain English, then sort into three buckets — strong fit, needs investigation, and candidate for stopping — to surface duplication and misalignment that no single leader currently has visibility over.
• •Triage function for incoming requests: When business or external requests flood in, establish a formal triage process requiring requesters to describe the problem and desired outcome before work is initiated. Staff it with people who know team capacity and strategic priorities, enabling informed trade-off conversations rather than reactive feature accumulation. NHS Head of Product James Higgott documents a working example.
• •Define services as verbs, not org charts: List what the organization does for customers using action-based language — claiming, getting support, renewing — rather than mapping to internal directorates. Attach measurable outcomes to each service. This outside-in framing gives every team, regardless of function, a shared reference point for steering decisions and evaluating whether current work is on target.