Tracking A Wealth Of Information | Savings of £600,000 over 2 years
NHS Digital is the national information and technology partner for the UK’s health and care system. Their vision is to harness the power of information and technology to make health and care better for the care professionals and people who work in the service, and for the people who receive them.
Watch this Video
“On previous investment programs similar to the GDE program we used a collection of different sources both internally and from the Trusts to gather information in one place. Aggregation and presentation of this information in management dashboards was labor-intensive. Now we’re pushing a button. We provide information almost instantly to our stakeholders; we can tell them what capabilities Trusts are delivering and if they are on track to deliver. This is the benefit of having quality information. We save time and money and deliver quality information and Cora’s solution enables us to do this. We speculated that by virtue of having far less work to do to aggregate and produce the quality output we could make efficiency savings of over £500,000 over the first two years.”
– Mark Cain
Programme Manager | NHS Digital
The Challenge:
- NHS Digital used a collection of different sources to gather information in one place. Aggregating this data into dashboards was extremely difficult. Trusts were using their own systems and templates to report data meaning it was difficult to extrapolate and look at things across the whole programme as everything was in a slightly different format.
- It was a long process for somebody on a monthly or bi-monthly basis to collect, validate, quality control, and put that data together to produce consistent, accurate dashboards that represent the progress the trusts are making.
- Keeping a handle on budget spend is crucial for NHS Digital as Trusts don’t get funding – which is often around £10 million per trust – upfront. They need to meet certain criteria, which go through rigorous governance appraisal. To get funding, they must provide evidence they’ve achieved targets agreed, as senior stakeholders have to be satisfied that the trust has delivered on their commitments for a milestone. Once approved, the money is released.
Capabilities Cora Bring:
- Having implemented Cora’s platform, NHS Digital can now easily track what money a trust has spent; how it has spent it; and where it is in terms of milestone delivery, i.e. if they have delivered everything they said they would deliver. Being able to quickly aggregate this data on a Cora dashboard is invaluable to project managers and senior management given the scale of managing the GDE programme across more than 50 trusts.
Benefits:
- Reduced Training: In addition to helping with governance, Cora PPM provides a standard mechanism for NHS Digital to manage its data, which means it’s easier for new trusts to come on board the GDE programme with minimal training.
- Cut Costs: Cora PPM has also delivered efficiency savings for NHS Digital. “We’ve speculated that by virtue of having far less work to do to aggregate and produce quality output, there’s savings of £500,000 or £600,000 over the first two years of people not mucking about trying to shoehorn information into spreadsheets,” says Cain. “We’ve got that monetary benefit straightaway.
- Reduced Time Reporting: Measurable results in cutting time to report, e.g. Time spent reporting each month cut from 10 hours to seconds, Time spent compiling project lists cut from 2-3 weeks to minutes, 1,000s of projects in a single view
- Focus on Value-Add Work: “We’re allowing our trusts to concentrate on delivering their programmes rather than wasting time filling in reports every couple of months,” says Cain.
- Smarter Decisions: “Another benefit we didn’t get from the spreadsheets was quality information. Having quality data allows us to make much better and efficient decisions. It’s quite easy to see, for example, by running reports across the whole programme – because we’ve categorised data in such a way that we’ve got consistent categories – if trusts are having problems delivering certain types of projects and capability. That allows us to make more informed decisions.”
Further Insights
Learn more about Cora Systems Portfolio Project Management Tool here.
Tune in to our most recent Project Management Paradise Podcast episodes available on Spotify and Apple.
