Following the recent publication of the NHS England guide to scaling people services, we've been hearing lots of conversations across system partners around how at-scale people services can be developed and optimised. Here are some of the learnings we have found as we have gone through our journey as a partner providing at-scale people services and solutions over the last ten years.
- Start with the end in mind It’s really helpful at the outset of your journey to have clear design principles agreed with your partners that you can factor in when designing your target operating model. Within that, it’s worth considering the scale of your ambition and designing with that scale in mind. This could include the use of bots and chatbots, enabling technology to manage workflows and support KPI management. Whilst you can grow and adapt incrementally as your services expand, it may make it easier to consider the growth ambition from the outset.
- Same, same, but different There can often be a challenge when delivering services using an economies of scale model around how you support individualisation and personalisation for organisations and user experiences. When considering your technical specification for enabling technologies and systems, it’s worth looking at solutions that can offer skeleton systems that are standard at the back end, but that can be personalised on the front end. A good example of this is SCW’s consultHR portal, which has one standard skeleton framework for all organisations that we support, but the user sees personalised logos relating to their specific organisation.
- Diversification vs. homogeneity When using an economies of scale model, be mindful of when diversification is helpful or when it actually dilutes the value of a ‘one for all’ approach. In SCW People Solutions, for example, we made the choice to invest in TRAC and an additional payroll system outside of ESR, which allows us to support organisations such as GP practices, charities, and other wider non-NHS system partners with running their recruitment and payroll.
- Other key themes we have shared learning on in relation to our experiences are around apportioning time and costs – how do you support system partners to engage flexibly and fairly and how are times of high-volume needs supported, as well as how effective relationship management and partnership engagement are critical to ensure effective partnership working and to support meeting the varying needs of all parties.
If you’d like to hear more about our experience of scaling people services, then please see our recent Spotlight on this topic, or contact
