Monthnote: March 2024
This month I have been mostly working on NHS App team structures, preparing for our next quarterly planning session and refining the roadmap for the next financial year.
Team structures
The NHS App team has grown considerably over the last year or so, but we’ve not adapted our structure to support this. This has led to problems like:
- the senior leadership team and profession leads are stretched too thin across too many teams
- some teams are too large
- several products/features of the NHS App do not have a team responsible for them.
Back in December, I wrote that “decide our new team structure and support people to shift into it” was one of my priorities. This is happening now.
We’re grouping our multidisciplinary product teams into 3 clusters:
- The Health Services cluster includes our transactional services, such as appointments and prescriptions.
- The Health Records cluster covers GP health records, care plans, test results and integrations with national-scale digital health services.
- The App Platform cluster looks after things that are unique to the NHS App, such as our information architecture, design system, notifications and user support.
Each of these clusters will have leads to help support and coordinate product, delivery, UCD and tech activities across the teams.
There’s also an App Operations cluster that includes service management, analytics, UCD operations and release management teams.
Most existing teams should experience very little difference with this new structure. The changes should be wholly positive: more support, more guidance and a quicker route to escalate issues. A couple of teams will be significantly affected though, and there are still things to work through with them.
The main lesson I’ve learned so far is that you can’t over-communicate when implementing change like this. We could have communicated a bit more a bit earlier.
Quarterly planning
The main feedback we’ve had every time we’ve done quarterly planning is “we should do this in-person”. So this time we are. And it’s forcing us to rethink how we run it in quite a helpful way.
It’s going to be less about building plans in Jira and more about the big picture — the highest priorities, the biggest issues and dependencies. We’re also sharing our traditional context-setting presentations as pre-recorded videos a couple of weeks in advance instead of at the beginning of day 1, which should give teams more time to respond to them.
Oh, and we’ll get to do a proper social in Leeds at the end of day 1 which should be a lot of fun.
Roadmap
The 2024/25 roadmap is coming together nicely. The NHS App is a key channel for other teams’ services to reach their audiences, so defining the roadmap is as much about aligning with other teams’ priorities as it is setting our own priorities.
I’ve had sessions with vaccinations, screening, proxy, Wayfinder, NHS.UK, NHS login and others over recent weeks to understand what they are hoping to deliver and when. And I’ve shared our plans and priorities with them in return. I’ve tried to capture all of this in a high-level view that makes sense for NHS App teams and stakeholders. It’ll continue to evolve throughout the year but it feels like a decent starting point.
My cultural highlights of the month
- Women in Revolt! at Tate Britain was an incredible collection of artefacts from 20 years of activism in Britain. It’s on until 7 April if you have the chance to see it.
- At The Photographers Gallery I saw Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad’s incredible mix of photography painting as well as a retrospective of photojournalist Bert Hardy — man, that guy knew how to take a picture.
- Slow Horses is a brilliant modern spy story. Anyone who enjoys playing ‘Identify the London location’ will especially enjoy it.
