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Healthcare Commission Case Study: Programme Management

Formed in April 2004, the Healthcare Commission found itself with a challenging strategic plan to consolidate and re-engineer inspection and regulatory activity across both the public sector and private Healthcare industries. The merging of several organisations with differing processes cultures and systems in what can only be regarded as a very aggressive timeframe presented a big challenge for the Management and Board. The entier team played a key role in putting in place a Programme Management approach that provided a way forwards, and ongoing methodology for managing change.

The business challenge

The Healthcare commission is a relatively small public body employing some 600 staff within the UK. Its strategic programme is driving a large amount of change including the decentralisation of its inspectors across 4 regions and 10 local offices.

Until the formation of the Healthcare Commission, the methods of assessment of the Healthcare industry were quite fragmented and disparate with duplication of activity and burden on all those involved

The strategy developed in 2004 set out the intentions over the next 3-5 years in terms of a number of key goals:

1. Ensure that patients, public and the health services have the best possible information about health and Healthcare available to them
2. Develop and maintain a fair, thorough and timely system to deal with complaints that have not been resolved at a local level
3. Set in place a proportionate and coordinated inspection procedure
4. Develop a standard approach to assessment

The complete programme of work (including a mixture of people, process and IT related changes) had a very sharp focus on delivery and so it was vital that the organisation had the right programme management capabilities in place quickly to enable them to succeed and maintain momentum. Creating this capability in a sustainable manner required a significant transformation for the whole organisation particularly its culture and attitude to projects. The major challenge lay in the lack of basic tools, techniques and skills that are needed to organise and run a large and complex programme. The situation was also worsened by the silo based activity that had developed by teams attempting to deliver various parts of the strategy

Our approach

Following the appointment of a senior member of the entier team as the overall programme manager, existing activities were reviewed and key stakeholders interviewed to assess the requirements, and target outcomes from the programme. Scope, high level plans and resources were set for the various component projects using the board members to take on ownership and sign off of the approach. entier worked closely with various teams of, project managers and directors to set up and embed a set of consistent tools for driving the organisation forwards in a consistent and controlled manner. These tools included :

 
1. Basic Project plans and dependency details
2. Risks and Issues Management capabilities
3. Decision Logs
4. Progress reporting (at all levels)
5. Resource plans
6. Overall Programme Governance Framework
7. Role Profiles (with clear accountabilities)
8. Budget and Financial Management
9. Induction Materials for new staff

In addition, a small but focussed team of Support staff were trained and put in place to work closely with the Stream Project Managers to implement and operate the above tools

Delivering results

In a matter of 6 weeks the organisation had migrated from a set silo and often competing activities to a programme with structure, clear direction and a set of known risks and issues under management.. For the staff and Board members it meant a number of benefits :

 
1. Degree of confidence in delivery (rather than a leap of faith that it would all come together)
2. Clarity in what was expected from people and when it was needed
3. Information at all levels that allowed the decisions to be made quickly and on an informed basis
4. Duplicated effort was eliminated and the gaps that people suspected were there were addressed
5. Budgets and resources were clarified and the “organisations cloth was cut to suit”
6. Improved morale
7. Opportunities for staff to learn new tools and techniques
8. Distinctions made between “Project work” and “Business as Usual”
9. Focus of activity on the important rather than the urgent
10. Ownership and encouragement form the Senior Team with an aligned and shared set of priorities and visions.