Delivering at Pace is the Civil Service behaviour about taking responsibility for timely, high-quality results with focus and drive. It is about keeping delivery moving when priorities compete, deadlines tighten or obstacles appear, without allowing quality or required controls to fall away.
The behaviour is not simply about working faster. Strong evidence shows prioritisation, ownership, active management and the ability to respond when the plan changes.
Your job advert will tell you whether Delivering at Pace is being assessed and how it will be tested. The current Civil Service behaviour guidance sets out the expectations by grade.
What Delivering at Pace means
A strong example starts with a clear outcome and deadline. You then need to show how you decided what mattered most, organised the work and monitored progress. If the plan changed, explain how you reacted rather than pretending everything went exactly as expected.
Quality still matters. Delivering quickly is weak evidence if accuracy, controls or customer outcomes suffer as a result. At more senior grades, the focus is increasingly on creating the conditions for other people to deliver while you retain overall accountability.
The strongest examples normally include some pressure: a deadline moved forward, demand increased, resources were reduced, a dependency failed or several urgent priorities competed at the same time.
What the behaviour looks like by grade
| Grade | What the evidence should show |
|---|---|
| AA / AO | Work with focus, organise your own workload, follow the right procedures, maintain quality and keep managers or stakeholders updated. |
| EO | Review team activity, set goals and responsibilities, identify barriers, make sure resources are available and take corrective action when progress slips. |
| HEO / SEO | Keep the team focused on top priorities, monitor milestones, reassess workload when demands conflict, give people authority to deliver and provide support while retaining accountability. |
| Grade 7 / Grade 6 | Set clear priorities and performance standards, provide the right resources, review expectations as circumstances change and maintain timely, quality delivery through challenging conditions. |
Choosing a strong example
Choose a story where there was genuine delivery pressure. A normal task completed by its normal deadline gives you little room to show prioritisation or recovery. Strong examples often involve a deadline moving forward, unexpected demand, a failed dependency, reduced resources or several urgent priorities competing at once.
Delivering at Pace 250 word statement
Use the opening to establish the delivery pressure: what had to be achieved, by when and what made it difficult. Then spend most of the word count on how you prioritised, organised resources, tracked progress and reacted when problems appeared.
The result should show delivery and quality together. Hitting the date is useful, but it is stronger if you can also show accuracy, customer impact, cost, throughput or another measure that proves the result was genuinely successful.
Delivering at Pace example
The existing example below scored 7/7 and remains useful because it shows rapid mobilisation, clear controls and a measurable delivery result rather than simply saying the candidate worked quickly.
Delivering at Pace interview questions
Typical Delivering at Pace questions include:
- Tell me about a time you worked to an extremely tight deadline.
- Tell me about a project that was falling behind and what you did.
- Describe a time you had several urgent priorities at once.
- Tell me about a time you had to reallocate resources quickly.
- How do you monitor delivery without micromanaging?
- Describe a time you maintained quality under severe time pressure.
- Tell me about a deadline you missed and what you learned.
Prepare examples where something genuinely changed during delivery. They give you much stronger evidence than a routine task completed on time.
Common mistakes
- Equating pace with simply working longer hours.
- Describing your own task list in detail without showing how priorities were set or changed.
- Ignoring quality because the deadline was tight.
- Giving a senior example that only shows personal productivity rather than delivery through a team or service.
- Giving no evidence that progress was monitored or that problems were acted on.
The strongest answers show control: the candidate knows what matters most, tracks progress, responds to problems and maintains standards while still meeting the required outcome.
Need an example for your grade? Choose the relevant statement or interview question below. Each guide is written for a different level of responsibility, so use the one that matches the vacancy rather than copying a more senior example.