Monthnote: November 2023

Where did that month go?

All change!

We said goodbye to Martin O’Neil as Programme Director for the NHS App, and welcomed Helena Powell into the role. There’s always a bit of a reset whenever someone new joins the team, which means that the vision and strategy work that Martin was leading on is going to take a little longer to be ready.

Planning more change

A group of us came together to discuss the future team structure for the NHS App. The number of people working on the service has doubled over the last year but the organisational structure has stayed the same.

We agreed on some of the main problems we are facing:

• Leadership roles are stretched too thin.
• Some of our product teams are larger than is ideal.
• Some parts of the NHS App don’t have a team that actively owns them.
• Some product teams are spending too much time managing relationships with external suppliers.

We also agreed some principles we want to bake into the future organisational structure:

• Every part of the NHS App should be owned by a team.
• Temporary ‘project’ teams should be the exception.
• We should have dedicated profession lead capacity in place to support best practice, consistency and quality.

There’s still a fair bit of work to do on organisational design, but we hope to implement new team structures between January and March 2024.

Extra-curricular activities

This month, I:

• sat on interview panels for senior product manager roles
• was lead assessor on a service assessment
• was guest speaker at 2 external groups (plus another 2 in the pipeline).

These are all voluntary, as in they are not part of my job description. They are exactly the sort of things I should be doing as an experienced, senior product leader in NHS England, but in order to fit them in this month I have had to work late to catch up with my ‘day job’. That’s why I’m writing this monthnote late on a Sunday evening.

These 3 things took up about 25 hours in total, so just over 3 working days. I don’t want to stop these things but I might need to set a stricter limit in future.

Service Design in Government

My talk about front doors, opportunity pipelines, product governance and enthusiastic ministers is now available to watch — along with about 20 other talks — on their website.

Here are the 4 links I included at the end of the talk:

• Defining problems: What’s your problem? by Tero Väänänen
• Assessing opportunities: Evaluation as a service: assessing stakeholder requests for agile teams by James Higgott
• Decision-making factors: Choosing what discovery to go forward with by Andrew Duckworth
• Boards for agile governance: The Product Council by Marty Cagan

My cultural highlights of the month

• Partygate on Channel 4. This dramatisation of the Sue Gray report was funny and deadly serious.
• Stereolab at Brixton Electric. My favourite band playing a venue near to where I live. What could be better?
• The Scarecrow by Lal and Mike Waterson. This song has been going round my head for weeks now.
• Nick Hart and Tom Moore at Jamboree. Great music, gorgeous venue. Nick has an album called Nick Hart Sings Ten English Folk Songs, which I love for its Ronseal name.