8 January 2024

Structure Co-ordination and Design Group: Handing over

A Salvation Army building with a red shield

Lieut-Colonel Dean Pallant, chair of the Structure Co-ordination and Design Group (SCDG), provides a final update as the group concludes its work.

At the end of a Sunday morning meeting, when we’d considered how we could better love God and love others, the corps officer concluded with this challenge: ‘The meeting is over, but the service is just beginning.’ That’s a very Salvation Army challenge! We are activists.

We know meeting for worship is essential to give us the energy and passion we need to be faithful and fruitful disciples of Jesus. However, we don’t meet for meeting’s sake. The challenge General William Booth gave to his eldest son, Bramwell, still resonates with the Army today: ‘Go and do something!’

For the SCDG, the meeting is over, but the service is just beginning.

In this final update, I must start by thanking the members of the SCDG who invested significant time, energy and wisdom into the project over the past three years. We decided not to use external management consultants, so all the work was done in addition to existing responsibilities. This saved the Army a significant amount of money and, we believe, resulted in better outcomes because we relied on the professionalism and skills already within the Army.

Thank you, friends – yes, we are all still friends, despite all the challenging discussions!

Lieut-Colonel Dean Pallant, Chair
Major Richard Waters, Project Manager
Commissioner Jenine Main
Major Howard Russell
Andrew Avison
Claire Anderson
Major Gregory Morgan (until December 2021)
Jo Mosley (until June 2021)
Alex O’Hara (since July 2021)
Major Beverly Baker (since July 2021)
Major Paul Kingscott (since July 2021)
Major David Taylor (until December 2021)
Major Kathy Taylor (January to May 2022)
Major Roger Batt (until December 2021)
Captain Berri McKenna (since January 2022)
Captain Vicky Crawford (since January 2022)
Paul Burr (since November 2022)
Major Hilarie Watchorn (since February 2023)

We were also helped significantly by Cabinet, which received progress reports at every meeting. Working closely with territorial leadership ensured there were no surprises as the proposals developed.

We were also helped by countless Salvation Army people, like you, who attended forums, completed the 2022 survey, participated in Divisional Design Groups, asked perceptive questions and helped the SCDG cut through processes and structures that have frustrated or burdened you as you seek to love God and love others through the Army.

A photo of the new THQ at Denmark Hill. — The new Territorial Headquarters

We have prayed hard, listened hard and taken a long hard look at what we do and why. The work is not over. There is lots to do to achieve the three desired outcomes of the project: transformation, integration and streamlining. However, progress has been made and it is the right time for the SCDG to hand over responsibility for the work moving forward.

This month, we will submit the Project Completion Report and a handover plan to Cabinet and SATCo. The proposal is for the Territorial Operations Board to be given responsibility to monitor the implementation of the handover plan during 2024 so we continue to improve ‘how we do things around here’ in the service of God.

What’s next?

The five main teams at Territorial Headquarters (THQ) are taking the lead on several pieces of work.

The Chief Secretary’s Office will be continuing to review how things are done, including how well the new processes are working to ensure local mission flourishes and how we live out the culture of continuous improvement, collaboration and release. A review of our boards and councils is ongoing.

Several initiatives are underway to ensure the territory has mature and capable leadership who enable the Army’s mission to be delivered so that people and communities flourish across the UK and Ireland. There are also developments to assist local leaders in gaining the capacity and skills to take on more responsibility for local mission delivery.

This service has a variety of tasks that will improve our processes and capability in carrying out practical tasks going forward. For example, we heard that it’s frustrating for local mission expressions to be asked for data a number of times and for constant verification, so the team is leading on a single data model that allows different datasets to work together and, as far as is technically possible, means data is requested once and used many times.

This will ensure data management is streamlined, integrated and provides verified, reliable, up-to-date data for decision-making. However, creating a data model for a complex organisation such as ours is a large undertaking and will take time.

Additionally, you told us that the current bandwidth in corps is not enough for streaming purposes, so the IT team continues with its rollout of WAN and wireless upgrades and replacements of corps infrastructure. Property is progressing its ambitious plan to ‘make it easier’ (see Salvationist magazine 25 February 2023).

In order to provide better access to financial reports, Finance is working to provide a new feature to the finance system in readiness for the 2024/25 financial year. The team is also working with a Franklin Covey programme called 4DX to significantly improve the timeliness of invoice payments. Further work is ongoing to improve training and user guides.

Our employee and officer/territorial envoy teams continue to find the best ways to track culture change measured against our values behaviour framework so they can identify where we can do better to improve the work/ministry environment for officers, envoys and employees. As part of this, there is a review of support, oversight and release processes, to dovetail with vision, values and mission priorities.

Mission will take the lead on investing in local mission with divisions, as well as in conversations around effectiveness of new mission roles and the viability of corps. Already there are projects planned for process improvements, such as the digitisation of corps rolls and improving the local officer appointment process, as well as integration of chaplaincy roles across the territory, which are currently managed by individual departments such as Older People’s, Homelessness and Mission Services. Work is ongoing to improve our chaplaincy services. A new emphasis on mission focus groups to increase integration in local mission delivery is also planned.

A new set of 14 divisional maps has been produced to illustrate all our local mission expressions, including those operated by Saha (our housing association) and SATCoL (our trading company). You can access the maps at salvationist.org.uk/our-territory. There is an ongoing investigation into mapping software that could work with our data, to provide everyone access to up-to-the-minute digital maps, but this will take time.

Work is ongoing to strengthen our internal communications system to both our members and employees and volunteers.

Membership communications have been improved through the launch of two additional Salvationist channels – online (salvationist.org.uk) and Salvationist Radio.

Employee, volunteer and officer communications will be improved when the new OurHub intranet is launched in the latter part of 2024. This is being designed for mobile first rather than desktop first.

Divisional Headquarters (DHQs)

This change process is not only being led by THQ. The 14 DHQs have been given greater freedom to adjust their structures and staffing to ensure they are working in the most effective manner for their context.

All DHQs will be facilitating and developing mission focus groups and divisional advisory councils to keep God’s mission at the heart of all they do and will reduce local administrative pressure with divisional administration support. Several new mission worker posts have been introduced to enable more local mission delivery.

Feedback welcome

The Chief Secretary’s Office will continue to welcome your feedback and questions. Please email transformation@salvationarmy.org.uk so your comments, questions and contributions continue to help us be the people and Army that God longs for us to be.

To God be the glory!