Another two week note, as I used the time I would have set aside for last week’s note to write my reflections on a sixth year in the NHS.
What did I learn?
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had calls with people leading various high priority initiatives arising from the Urgent and Emergency Care (UEC) and Primary Care recovery plans. Each of them has a clear story to tell about how the particular change they are leading will help to make things better for patients and frontline staff. There are no magic digital solutions to the performance challenges our services face, but involving the right digital specialists at the right time will make a big difference to successful implementation of all these initiatives. Coordinating our team’s involvement across the different pieces of work is going to be quite a challenge, and we’ll need to work hard at keeping each other informed.
One of the initiatives in the digital channels area is starting to bear fruit. We’re now running a test with a small percentage of users in a live service, and what we learn from this will help us work out the next steps. Meanwhile a contract for additional support to help us deliver the work seems to have cleared all its approval hurdles. I’ve learned a lot, both about my organisation and my team, through the process of getting this signed off.
What did I enjoy?
A day working together with the team on our Product teams future operating model. As a virtual team with people based hundreds of miles apart from each other, it felt like a luxury to be able to meet in the middle – face to face in Birmingham – and we stayed for drinks and snacks together before heading home our different ways.
More than 5 hours of train time for me meant that I had a chance to properly think through some ways of governing and assuring our work in the new operating model. We need to set out a clear path for change, so that our decision-making processes shift away from isolated programme business cases and towards the role of the multidisciplinary product team. Our product strategies will be the places where we demonstrate that we are continuously thinking about outcomes, options, and risks. Quarterly business planning will be a vital assurance mechanism where all our activity can be looked at together. Product managers will need to take accountability for maximising the on-going return on investment in the product by tightening feedback loops, progressively narrowing uncertainty and risk, and managing down optimism bias through high situational awareness of user and business needs, the delivery context and delivery capability. I firmly believe it is possible to implement this way of working in the public sector, and to give more assurance across the dimensions of the HM Treasury “Green Book” than has been the case under the ill-fitting legacy processes we used before.
What was hard?
I felt uncomfortable putting the brakes on a paper that was due to go to the steering group that I chair, especially because I had to make the decision only the day before the meeting. Afterwards, I wondered how I might have made my expectations clearer to the team involved so we didn’t get into that situation. We’ll have more conversations and bring it back in the next cycle of meetings.
What do I need to take care of?
Next week, people working across our directorate will get individual letters telling them their provisional status in our post-merger reorganisation. For most colleagues, I hope the news will be reassuring. The situation will be less clear for people in some roles, with further steps to follow. It’s a complicated process with many permutations, while other directorates we work alongside are going through the same process but on different timelines. We need to look out for everyone and make sure they have the support they need in the coming weeks.
Matt Edgar writes here 