Project Overview
NHS England replaced non-standardised spreadsheets with OCIT, an organisational change tracker that structures HR processes, assigns tasks and notifications, and delivers real-time status via a central dashboard. Built using SharePoint Online for access and Azure-hosted services with Azure Functions, React, the Fluid Framework, and Azure SQL, the solution scales to 8,000 staff and embeds EDI and ESR integration.
The project was delivered on schedule and within budget, enabling approximately £140m in savings. The work reflects Transparity’s App Innovation capabilities and aligns with Modern Workplace and SharePoint consulting services.
The Challenge
Due to various reforms, NHS England was planning for considerable restructuring activity and workforce churn requiring significant management effort. Coupled with this, the organisation had to adhere to strict procedures while implementing this upcoming change.
Their existing IT solution for managing this activity was a set of non-standardised Excel spreadsheets. They quickly recognised this was both unscalable and presented several additional problems:
- The use of multiple spreadsheets did not support an accurate set of reports through which managers could glean the vital insight they needed to ensure a successful outcome for all the stakeholders.
- It would be very difficult to ensure that they were following the strict change implementation procedures to mitigate the risk of being in breach and liable to a trade union claim.
- The management resource available was insufficient; they needed to be empowered to work more efficiently to deal with the workload.
The Solution
The project followed a waterfall methodology which involved rigorous upfront design. This design included a database design for the relational data, an object model with a class library, a set of UI wireframes, performance considerations and integration requirements with NHS England’s HR system. There were a few changes that were made part-way through the development as NHS England discovered new requirements, and these changes were factored in with only small amounts of change control needed.
The solution comprised a custom application which allows the data to be stored in a relational database instead of Excel spreadsheets. The user interface provided HR staff with the ability to design different processes through which they could progress and track staff members undergoing different organisational changes. At different stages in the process staff members and their line manager could be assigned tasks and receive notifications.
From a technical perspective: the application used SharePoint as an authentication portal to a custom front-end designed using Office UI Fabric which is Microsoft’s open-source library of UI components to provide a consistent UX for end users. The back end of the application was hosted in Azure, business logic was executed using Azure Functions which enabled the application to easily scale to the 8,000 members of staff. The data was stored in Azure SQL server which was also tuned to deliver the appropriate level of resource as demand on the server varied.
The Outcome
The project was delivered successfully, on schedule and within budget and enabled NHS England and Improvement to facilitate a change programme which delivered approximately £140m of savings. The project has been put forward for an award for innovation in HR.
Key Benefits
- Standardised and better quality KPI information
- Consistency in communications issued to staff
- Assurance, robustness, and defensibility of HR processes
- Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) built in to processes
- Integration to ESR to ensure leavers, starters and changers all treated correctly.
