Our Digital Transformation team’s in-depth review and strategic guidance significantly improved Lancashire and South Cumbria integrated care system’s programme management office, leading to enhanced governance, better resource allocation, and a clear roadmap for future development.

Background

Lancashire and South Cumbria (L&SC) integrated care system asked NHS Midlands and Lancashire’s) (NHS ML’s) Digital Transformation team to undertake a review of their journey in setting up a programme management office and its governance. They had made some progress in setting up and finding tools, but realised they needed more work to become more stable and controlled. L&SC wanted the team to closely look at their current practices across their whole portfolio and suggest ways to reach their goals.

Action

Our Digital Transformation team worked closely with L&SC to explore existing process, controls, and capabilities across six areas; definition, finance and allocation of resource, controls, communication and engagement, change/benefits management and PMO/programme control.

The review process was split into three defined parts:

1. A detailed document review to establish the current project position with source material shared by the L&SC team

2. A series of interviews to ‘deep dive’ into the review areas with L&SC project and programme leads

3. A series of interviews with the senior leadership team to review the areas from a senior perspective.

The outcomes of the review processes informed an assessment of project and programme management capacity and capability. NHS ML’s assessment provided a current baseline for each of the projects and programmes within scope and identified opportunities for improvement to support the development of the programme management office along with identification of key areas to be prioritised. Following the assessment, the L&SC requested further support with implementing the findings and next steps with their project teams.

NHS ML’s team designed and facilitated a two day workshop to provide this feedback and further develop the next steps with key input from the L&SC project teams.

Impact

NHS ML’s Digital Transformation team offered valuable insight into the L&SC programme management office’s current state, along with advice and guidance on how to develop their programme management office into a controlled, stable state.

This included the identification of key areas requiring the development of tools and templates, as well as recommendations for improvements to governance, links to strategy and ownership of budgets. Furthermore, our Digital Transformation team prioritised these recommendations for L&SC and built on them with the engagement of the L&SC project teams to initiate the development of the tools, templates and improvement activities, giving them the confidence to own their plan and actions to get to their future state.

The result of this collaborative approach provided L&SC with a clear roadmap for the development of their programme management office, with clear actions and owners against this roadmap and extremely positive feedback from both the project team and senior leadership team in terms of the approach to this work as well as the output. Subsequently, NHS ML’s Digital Transformation team have been engaged to further support L&SC with an outsourced programme management office service.

Feedback

“I wanted to feedback to you on the positive partnership that we had with Gurpreet, Steve, and Lizzie. The work was well managed and undertaken in a true spirit of partnership, support, and guidance. The whole digital staff team reported a really positive experience and valued the input from Steve and Lizzie in the one-to-one interviews. We have a clear roadmap now of where we need to utilise our limited resources and priorities. I wanted to personally acknowledge the hard work that Lizzie put into the process and the workshop, she is a real asset to your team.”

Janet Davies | Programme Lead Digital PMO | Lancashire and South Cumbria ICS