New adventures ahoy

I have some news, not big in the grand scheme of things but still, for me, news.

I’m leaving NHS Digital and the work of the Service Manual to join the growing hub of digital transformation at Kettering General Hospital. If you don’t know Kettering it’s a mid-sized town in the middle of England, which recently my colleague Mohammed told me was famed for its Weetabix connections.

I’m going there to be Deputy Chief Digital Information Officer, that’s Deputy to Andy Callow — previously programme head for the NHS App.

I have a great job, I wasn’t really looking, but when I saw this tweet…

And then when I clicked through to the job ad I saw this:

As part of the Leadership team of the Digital Portfolio, you along with others will be striving towards “Applying the culture, processes, business models & technologies of the internet era to respond to people’s raised expectations” [Tom Loosemore’s definition of Digital].

I thought ‘if you’re quoting Tom Loosemore in a job ad I’ve got to find out more’. So I applied, and I was lucky enough to be shortlisted and invited to an open day with other candidate for the 4 or 5 jobs they were recruiting to. It was great talking to the other candidates, everyone was really open and they were proper people. Glad I decided to be true to myself and turned up in jeans and a t-shirt…

It’s worth mentioning the open day — Andy gave a super realistic but inspiring presentation about the journey Kettering is on to be Outstanding (in terms of CQC ratings) and how ‘going digital is a key strand’ of that journey. We toured the premises, including a visit to an ‘end of life care’ ward and I met two super enthusiastic (and ultra-professional) Chief Nursing Information Officers (CNIO).

The day gave a real taste for the challenges ahead, and only inspired me more.

So this post is to reflect on my time at NHS Digital, and to capture some of what I’ve learnt.

1. It’s about people. I’ll come back to this.
2. It’s about being comfortable with change. When I joined NHS Digital both the organisation and myself were on a journey. If I knew it before I know it even more now. Embrace change.
3. It’s about learning. I’ve worked in digital for 20 years — back in the day when it was called ‘electronic PR, and then Web, and then Web 2.0, with a bit of ‘business process re-engineering, and then social media. And now it’s digital. But I’ve learnt so much in my time at NHS Digital, always keep learning, no matter how much you think you know.
4. It’s about delivery. I’m very proud of what we’ve done to deliver the NHS Digital Service Manual, but I also contributed to significant deliveries for the redesign of NHS.UK for Expo 2018, and with follow on work with Accenture which led to an ongoing IA project for NHS.UK and spin off ‘content modularisation work’. Big stuff, delivering value to the health system.
5. It’s about ‘changing the weather’. To channel Tom Loosemore — change the conditions of the organisation you’re in so you can build great things in a great way. Open, iterative, transparent. I think we’ve demonstrated that at NHSD.
6. It’s about keeping an agile mindset — release often and early, learn and iterate.
7. It’s about building things that last. As I leave NHS Digital (and NHSX) behind I think I’ve done enough for the Service Manual to grow. It was a fledgling baby no-one wanted to cease when the budget got tight, and one year from launch in January 2020 we moved to a live URL– it’s now a capital asset! It’s also embedded in the thinking of NHSX assurance folks.
8. It’s about delivering value. Budgetary and people constraints are just that — two of many constraints that we work with and within. It doesn’t mean we can’t do excellent stuff.
9. It’s about being positive. I wrote elsewhere about training I attended with Roman Pichler — there are ways to be more positive in what we do ‘practise right speech’, ‘empathetic listening’ and grow your ‘referent power’. And I’ll continue to channel Mohammed — “enough trash talking”…
10. It’s about the challenge, personally. I spent many years at one fine institution — the OU — I had moderately senior responsibilities (and launched online experiences that supported 11,000 staff, 200,000 students, and helped recruit more than a million people into life changing learning), 3 years on from leaving the OU I’ve swapped ‘industries’, still working in places that can make a difference to people’s live, in organisations that CARE (see KGH’s take on this).
11. It’s about the challenge, professionally. The modern issues of the day, cloud hosting, (modern) telephony, distributed working culture and tools and then the clinical ones. I have a steep learning curve on that…
12. It’s about being humble. Hospitals are there to help people’s lives, to save people’s lives. I’m in awe of people doing such work, and in my role I intend to remind myself every day who are the real heroes out there.
13. It’s about reflecting on the things you’ll miss. I’ll miss the cycle commute across London — for the first year swinging past Buckingham Palace and the second year crossing Waterloo bridge. But of course I’ll miss the people…
14. So people. I’d like to say thanks to Becky and Alan for giving me the opportunity at NHS Digital, and for Juliet for the sponsorship (and then Iain). And thanks to the great people I’ve been lucky to work closely with — Dominic, Mark, Olivia, Eric, Mohammed, Sara, Adam, David, Ben, Leigh, Sarah, Jesmond, and those in the wider NHS.UK team — James, James, Mark, Richard, Trilly, Nam, Joe, Jo, Tom and of course those masters of design thinking, Dean Vipond and Matt Edgar. I’ll miss you all.

And people is one of the reasons I’m going to Kettering, they’re forging a new team, Andy is honest about the challenges ahead — see his weeknotes here — there’s a determination and desire to make a difference you rarely see.

So westward ho!

I’ll try and weeknote as I go, or maybe occasional Medium posts…