Over the last year I’ve been doing a lot of work with leaders in the NHS helping them to navigate change and understand to get the most out of technology in support of improvement. One of the resources that I found really useful in the research phase of the project were these questions for leaders which have been articulated on the NHS Providers site. They were originally compiled by the smart folk at Public Digital to help leaders gain insights about their own digital transformation. There’s lots more behind these high-level questions so it’s well worth reading the whole thing, but I wanted to highlight them here as I think this is such a great list. These were obviously created in the context of NHS Trusts but could be transposed for the senior leadership team for any large organisation:
- How close are you as a board to what your users experience?
- Are your discussions more focused on outcomes or outputs?
- Are you seeing evidence that your digital programme is delivering visible value to patients in weeks and months, rather than years?
- Who does most of the talking when the topic of ‘digital’ is raised?
- Are teams in the trust empowered to experiment with new ways of working?
- Is the trust set up to support scaling up of successful experiments across the organisation?
- Can you explain what your digital strategy has not prioritised, and why?
- What have you turned off, or stopped doing, as a direct consequence of your digital transformation?
- Are you confident you have access to real-time feedback on what patients, staff and other key stakeholders need?
- Is the organisation taking opportunities to copy and adapt learning and work from other trusts, the centre (NHS Digital/NHSX) and other industries? Is it openly sharing its own work?
So much of value in these questions, particularly around adaptiveness, experimentation, stakeholder and customer feedback and needs, prioritisation and just as importantly de-prioritisation. So useful.
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash
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