The government has won some plaudits for its strategy of investing in IT to improve efficiency, but according to the chief executive at one of the UK's leading county councils, the sheer scale of the changes required threatens to swamp some councils.

John Sinnott, chief executive of Leicestershire County Council, says that despite retaining its four-stars-out-of-four performance ranking from the Audit Commission at the end of last year, his council faced a struggle to keep up with the pace of transformation required by central government.

"We were rated an excellent authority at the end of 2004 and in mid-2005 we launched a discussion to see how we could improve further," says Sinnott. "But it became apparent from that discussion that people were struggling with the sheer scale of the transformation agenda. [Managers] were taking on more than they could handle."

To assess the scale of the problem, the council launched a stock take of its change-management programme, with support from Deloitte Consulting, and found it had 79 strategic projects and even more departmental initiatives.

"We had a range of competing priorities to consider – electronic service delivery, shared services, priority outcomes, efficiency savings and legislative changes for children's services, adult social care and education – and this had created a vast number of projects and initiatives across the council," said Council leader David Parsons in a statement. "The result was overloading our staff. It made it difficult for us to balance the transformation we wanted to make with the operational day-to-day delivery of excellent services, and we were missing opportunities by not joining up projects."

Faced with these demands on resources, last autumn Sinnott appointed a corporate management team and took on further consultancy support from Deloitte to reduce the number of active projects and set the council's top priorities. The new team recommended focusing on four areas – including projects to improve customer services and organisational efficiency as well as initiatives to improve the council's employment environment and enhance children's and adults' social services – and axing projects that did not fit the new programme.

Meanwhile, the council also set up a new change management unit to provide specialist support for the retained projects. "This team provides a central point of expertise for the IT, legal, property and HR skills that projects typically need," according to Sinnott.

The reorganisation has given senior managers more insight into the council's transformation programme, a benefit Sinnott believes will ultimately filter through to the public. "We are seeing projects better managed and we now have more disciplined processes for how we select projects to greenlight," he says. "That means more successful projects and fewer problems."