A new qualification for a whole profession, approved at every level.

A chartered professional and regulatory body needed to rebuild how its profession qualifies. The existing qualification and assessment model was out of date and in need of reform. Replacing it meant a new qualification, modular assessment, the learning around it, and the right to award the qualification itself. Every future member would pass through it, and the body did not yet have the specialist skills to build it.

The body is two things at once, a professional body and a regulator, and each has its own governance. A change this size answers to both. Programmes like this usually go wrong before they start, by building before anyone has agreed what is being built, or what it is worth.

We set the programme up before letting it run. One integrated plan. Risks and dependencies owned by name. Assurance built into the programme and checked from outside it.

Then we matched the method to the work: agile where the product was still being found, product management for the learning, portfolio control over the whole. The workstreams had been designing a qualification, an assessment and a learning offer separately. We turned them into one service, designed as one experience.

Before anything was committed, an options analysis tested the strategic and financial case. The business case followed the Green Book, so the investment was decided on affordability and value for money, not ambition. We helped shape the commercial model it depends on. And because the change reaches every member of the profession, adoption was planned as seriously as delivery.

The high-level design, the outline business case and the integrated plan for implementation and transition were all approved by the executive team, the board, the regulatory board and the governing council.

One of the success measures we set at the start is the one we will be judged on last: leaving the body with the capability to deliver the implementation, run the transition and operate in a steady state without us.