Equipping NHSX for IT operational and development excellence

Challenge

NHSX (National Health Service X) was the digital transformation unit of NHS England and employed approximately 1.5 million people. Established in 2019, the NHSX mission was to drive the digital transformation of the NHS and social care ensuring that patients and staff benefitted from modern technology by setting national policy and developing best practice for NHS technology, digital and data.

Following the rapid deployment of the Covid Pass App in response to the pandemic in 2020, the NHSX (National Health Service X) Covid Status Certification Service had reached a point whereby it needed transferring from the programme it operates under, into a more permanent and appropriate live services supporting area.

To do this, NHSX needed to understand the current Service Management and DevOps capability within the Covid Status Certification Service, identify areas for strengthening, and develop a roadmap for improvement that addressed service delivery, development agility, release quality, and prepared the service for transition.

Solution

Over a 10-week period, Mason Advisory engaged over seventy stakeholders across the business via a series of group workshops, focus sessions and individual meetings. In addition, we reviewed over one hundred artefacts against industry standard blueprints and frameworks, specifically ITIL and DORA.

Service Management

To understand the Service Management capability, we assessed a total of twenty-two operating practices across both the existing Covid Status Certification Service teams and the target live services teams. Our ITIL aligned, IT Service Management Framework broke each practice down into a detailed set of content and assessment approaches, allowing a maturity position to be determined, and our Service Transition checklist allowed a specific list of the elements required to be in place at the point of hand-over to the live service teams to be developed.

Through this method, we observed that many of the critical elements required for transition in the Covid Status Certification Service were already well established and in a state of readiness for transition and formal hand-over with minimal to no effort required. We collaborated with key stakeholders to develop a clear roadmap of activities to address the remaining gaps quickly. Additionally, we provided several industry standard blueprints and templates to accelerate the implementation of the key transition elements within the 10-week window.

DevOps

Mason Advisory’s DevOps assessment looked specifically at NHSX’s alignment to Google’s DevOps Readiness and Assessment (DORA) framework, and with a focus on the ‘path to live’ we noted that:

• there were opportunities to increase automation, as some methods used throughout the environment were manual, complex and varied,
• development, testing, and operations could benefit from more integration and collaboration in some areas, to enhance Agile practices,
• historical needs for rapid build and deployment in a changing environment presented challenges, impacting the focus on architecture and automation.

Our maturity assessment against the DORA domains highlighted key areas where NHSX could further adopt DevOps principles. By mapping the DORA domains against the four Accelerate metrics: deployment frequency (DF); lead time to changes (LTTC); mean time to recovery (MTTR); change failure rate (CFR); we identified key metrics  to focus and prioritise the improvement roadmap activities. This enabled us to make informed recommendations for improvement and transition.

We conducted reviews of existing technology and processes as well as future technology opportunities. By comparing these with the business needs we were able to make informed recommendations, validating them with reference cases from outside the client where applicable.

Outcome

For all the Service Management practices and DevOps domains in scope, our combined Service Management and DevOps findings report provided a full description of the current state observations and associated maturity scores, along with recommendations for improvements as well as:

• a Service Management roadmap showing the critical activities to undertake to ready the service for transition as well as long-term, strategic improvements to consider in the future,
• a recommended transition approach to deliver service value quickly and efficiently, supported by a bespoke transition criteria checklist to allow NHSX to easily track progress,
• a DevOps roadmap showing the steps for each domain to take to better align with DevOps principles whilst improving the culture and capability within the team
• a set of DevOps metrics to allow NHSX to continue to monitor its maturity.

Our Team was able to help NHSX accelerate the transition of the Covid Status Certification Service significantly, leaving them with a clear plan and tracking mechanism to allow them to complete the transition independently.

We also helped NHSX significantly improve the quality of releases through our recommendations, working hand in hand with the supplier to improve its performance, and embed the recommended ways of working.

“Our team all enjoyed working with such a collaborative and open client which complimented our structured approach and enabled us to define clear focus areas for the future of the Covid Status Certification Service. It was such a privilege to work with the NHSX to help them strengthen such a high-profile service.”

Martin Lunt, Project Manager – Mason Advisory

If you would like to speak to one of our industry experts regarding this case study, email contact@masonadvisory.com

Find out more about our services.