The challenge

In 2020, the Prime Minister announced the government’s intention to reform the core institutions that lead public health nationally. The Covid pandemic brought a period of significant change and intense public and political scrutiny to the health sector, inciting the creation of a new public health landscape.

Core to this Machinery of Government (MoG) change was the creation of a new national Health Security Agency and the realignment of health improvement functions across a complex mix of health organisations to better enable the country to effectively respond to increasing health threats. Cadence Innova led the (c£30m) transition of vital technology, data and information infrastructure which underpinned this momentous health sector shift.

With c2000 people delivering national healthcare priorities at the centre of this change, it was critical to transition with a people-centric approach to ensure minimum disruption to operational delivery. To achieve this, a robust change management approach was embedded throughout all technical planning, design, and implementation.

A phased approach

Avoiding change saturation was paramount, particularly important given the work commenced during the pandemic, a time of significant collective stress, and the ongoing critical responsibilities of the impacted workforce. We proactively employed several tactics to help mitigate this risk including phasing the delivery to stagger implementation, incorporating recovery time for highly impacted teams, and building in additional engagement opportunities during sensitive periods of the programme delivery.

User experience was prioritised over technical parameters, and this helped to determine the phases of delivery ensuring that with each implementation the workforce gained capability, thus building maturity at each phase.

Phases:

1. Equipping teams with essential technology (devices and accounts) to support their integration into their new organisation, whilst maintaining access to required services, applications, and support in the old for continuity until alternatives could be provided.

2. Consolidation of digital identities and Microsoft 365 applications, including the migration of all Microsoft data from Outlook, OneDrive and Teams.

3. Migration of c200TB of legacy Network File Share data into the new environment

4. Incremental transition and decommissioning of >20 applications.

Preparing for change

The delivery team blended technical excellence with change and communication capabilities which ensured that we always considered, and planned for, the people implications of all technical designs. This enabled us to manage senior stakeholder expectations effectively and take into consideration organisational context in preparing impacted users ahead of implementations.

Adopting the Prosci prepare, manage, sustain model on each phase enabled us to create transparency and helped embody a ‘no surprises’ delivery principle with all stakeholders. Delivery principles also covered our approach to information governance, business-as-usual stability, user experience prioritisation, and fixing-forward. These five principles underpinned our delivery strategy and helped create cohesion and shared understanding on programme priorities across our complex stakeholder matrix from the outset.

Managing the change

Communication and engagement were core to the delivery backbone of each phase of the transition. Working closely with each involved organisation, we actively integrated into their teams so that we could quickly build the connection with the impacted workforce. This enabled a personal approach and provided us a more trusted platform to understand and act on their needs and concerns. We devoted time to building the awareness of the planned approach (through the use of both corporate and more tailored channels), which in turn increased workforce confidence and assurance ahead of implementations. This upfront investment also enabled us to identify and nurture our change advocates who then played a valuable role influencing others throughout implementations.

Continuous feedback loops and application of learning was also built into each phase and were rigorously actioned. This helped to not only remediate issues quickly but also to build resilience in each of the organisations and trust with all our stakeholders along the journey.

Sustaining the outcomes

Due to the phased approach taken, sustaining change has been a continuous process, rather than the final chapter. We have delivered this using various techniques including building in a ‘hypercare’ period into the timeline for all technical implementations, providing a window post-go live for even the smallest of issues to surface. These fed the creation of knowledge articles to support the workforce in addressing similar issues that may arise in the future.

Standard operating procedures and new processes implemented as part of each phase have also been documented and BAU support teams upskilled so that they are equipped after the exit of Cadence Innova.

This piece of work was carried out by Cadence Innova before merger. We're honoured to continue this impactful work under the Transform brand going forward.