The purpose of the review is to help the Australian Department of Social Services (DSS) enrich its capability to achieve its goals over the next four years. The report describes opportunities to improve capability at DSS – some small and some that will take many years to embed.

The report provides a detailed assessment of the agency capability in the areas of leadership and culture, collaboration, delivery, workforce and enabling functions. A summary presentation of maturity ratings assesses a number of areas as 'developing'. 

It finds the most important changes for the Department will be:

• continuing to uplift policy and strategy, including providing bold advice to government
• improving delivery capability and partnerships with government and non-government stakeholders
• describing what success looks like in terms of real-world impacts and driving efforts to achieve this, both internally and with external delivery partners
• making the time to be deliberate and strategic about where and when DSS invests its finite resources.