Planning for April to June 2024

Teams working on the NHS App get together every 3 months and share their plans for the next quarter. This is an opportunity to identify dependencies, duplication and areas for collaboration. It’s also a chance for product, engineering and design leads to share some high-level messages about priorities and principles.

Here are the messages I shared:

Top-level goals

There are 2 main top-level goals for the NHS App as a product:

• Reduce the burden on frontline staff
  Reduce the number of tasks required of all staff at GP surgeries and NHS call centres, and clerical staff at hospitals, by supporting users to self-serve and self-care.
• Reduce barriers to care
  Ensure that the NHS App can be used by all, and that features and integrations are available to the largest possible share of our user base.

We also have 1 goal for ourselves as a team:

• Improve the user experience of the NHS App
  Make it as easy, quick and reliable as possible for users to complete tasks, so that the NHS App is their preferred way of doing these.

Overall, we have a long-term ambition to move a third of all interactions to be digital first via the NHS App and NHS website.

Integrations will be big

The area where I expect to see the most change in this quarter is ‘integrations’. We have been working on a number of things that will really start to impact how we onboard and manage integrations in the future.

(For context, much of the functionality of the NHS App is delivered by integrating third-party services. You can read more on this at https://digital.nhs.uk/services/nhs-app/partners-and-developers.)

Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash

Some of the changes I expect to see are:

• establishment of the new Integration Management Team who will look after long-term relationships with the suppliers of integrated services (a role that’s currently sitting with individual product teams)
• embedding and iterating the new integration process that’s being trialled between January and March
• updated guidance for third-parties whose services we are integrating
• a clearer view of our overall integration strategy
• a clearer view of relative priority across all integrations on the backlog / roadmap
• early thinking about new types of integrated service, such as digital NHS health check, screening, care plans, digital therapeutics and test results
• improved design patterns for jump offs between the core NHS App and integrated services
• better data about what happens when users go into integrated services
• and if all that’s not enough, we will be onboarding a bunch of new services for our users to access.

We have many other commitments and plans across the teams working on the App (see our public roadmap) but integrations is the area where I expect to see the most change.

Principles to bear in mind

• It is better to under-promise and over-deliver than the other way around.
• Map your dependencies. Cross-team dependencies are highly likely for data and analytics, notifications and messaging, and navigation and design. But what additional support do you need from NHS App teams, or other teams across NHS England?
• Raise your hand if you have doubts about something on the roadmap. We all know that things can change between agreeing to do a thing and actually doing it — decisions made several months ago can be revisited.
• Plans can change — they are not set in stone. We will formally review our plans for April to June at the end of March, but we should be reviewing them constantly.

Having a balanced roadmap

This image is adapted from an original by John Cutler. I’ve re-named the categories of work to use the language more familiar to NHS England product teams.

The basic message is “think about the balance of your roadmap”. There is no magic formula that says you should spend 20% of your time on this and 30% of your time on that — it will be different for every team. But if your roadmap is too focused on new features you’re storing up pain for the future.

Descriptions of each category of work can be found in my last blog post about quarterly planning.

Moving parts and how to think about them

We work with uncertainty at all times. Having a plan (a plan that can be adapted) is an important way of dealing with that.

Here’s how I suggest you you think about some specific sources of uncertainty:

• Team structures
  We are expecting changes to team structures as the NHS England future operating model settles. Some changes are already happening. We don’t expect the remaining changes to be radical, so prepare your plans on an as-is basis, and if we do need to make changes once the new team structures emerge we can deal with that as part of the process.
• Business planning for 2024/25 and NHS App strategy
  These are both being developed right now. We may need to change our priorities as a result of these things but from what we’ve seen so far things seem to be aligned.