Author: Ekta Mehta

A Voyage of Discovery

Posted on: 10 May 2023
A Voyage of Discovery

A month into live operation of your new system and everything could not be running more smoothly. The solution went in on time and within the original budget and quickly delivered benefit, fulfilling the needs and expectations of your business and IT. Everyone was clear from the outset about what needed to be achieved and why.

Panacea, perhaps, but as a solutions supplier, we want this outcome as much as you, our customer. There are many reasons IT projects succeed or fail, some of which are unpredictable, but what practical measures can you take to give us all the best possible chance of a great outcome?

A key measure of success of solution delivery is that the requirements it set out to meet were indeed met. This sounds obvious, but if the requirements laying this foundation were unclear or incomplete, it is unlikely that the solution delivered on them, or that consensus was reached that work was complete. It is no wonder that the Government Digital Service (GDS) stipulates “define user needs” as the first point for consideration in their Technology Code of Practice.

For CACI as a solution supplier, it would be superb if we embarked on a major project where all requirements were fully defined, with clear, testable acceptance criteria and supporting specifications were in place. We could focus our efforts entirely on design, build and testing. But let’s get real: this rarely happens. Eliciting, analysing, validating and documenting a full, detailed baseline of functional and non-functional requirements effectively, is a time-consuming activity. It has dependencies on skilled business analysts and subject matter experts from the business, and technical and security teams who may not be available ahead of procurement or the project mobilising.

CACI’s FUSION delivery methodology recognises this reality by proposing a structured approach through our Shape step. CACI can support these activities as much as you need to build a strong foundation and achieve success together.

To hit the ground running once a supplier is appointed, what practical measures can be taken by you ahead of project mobilisation, when time and specialist skills may be in short supply, to research and define your users’ needs?

Start with the Afters

You should ensure there is a clear definition of the benefits that the solution aspires to deliver. These may reflect pain points the solution is intended to address or additional gains that will be achieved.

There needs to be consensus on these drivers at a business level and with your key stakeholders who will be engaged in delivery.

Having this in place will help provide some shape to the requirements and inform prioritisation. Without it, there may be a lack of clarity on what the solution should be setting out to achieve, which in turn will disrupt delivery both for your organisation and the supplier, once appointed.

Breadth before Depth

It is sensible to appoint a single owner for the business and IT requirements, often called a product owner, and ensure they are fully supported to fulfil that remit. This might involve access to business analysts and subject matter experts (SMEs) on technical aspects and business operations.

They should first establish that the breadth of requirements is complete before the more time-consuming elaboration on the depth (detail). This will help you track where the scope has been defined and where work still needs to be done.

One approach is to take a top-down view, first identifying the major groups of requirements, for example, by breaking it down into epics:

Take each epic a step further by identifying users’ functional needs, such as through defining user stories: “As a [actor], I need to [do something], so that I can [achieve something]”, and adding these to the epics. Just one line per user story is sufficient at this stage.

The system will also need to comply with the organisation’s technical and security standards. Furthermore, there may be other aspects requiring the new solution to “be” something, rather than perform a function. For example, it may need to be available between specific hours, have a certain technical capability or comply with a security standard. These are known as non-functional requirements (NFRs).

If the new “to be” solution is replacing an old “as is” one, you need to ensure that you fully understand all aspects of what the “as is” system achieves and ensure that these are reflected in the “to be” requirements, or that there is agreement as to which elements will not be in scope.

Elicitation of requirements merits an article in its own right, but may involve workshops, interviews, surveys and document reviews. The Chartered Institute for IT (BCS) provides a framework and certification for requirements engineering, which includes such techniques.

Once a working set of requirements has been established, these need to be cross-checked to:

  • Identify and resolve any conflicts
  • Remove duplicates
  • Ensure they are accurate, consistent and understandable

Reviewing that requirements are aligned to the benefits the solution is seeking to achieve, and prioritising accordingly, ensures they will deliver against the business goals.

Now is a great time to agree a baseline for your requirements, since the scope has been fully defined and therefore amendments can be controlled through a change management process. You are also in a strong position to engage with a supplier on detailed implementation plans to deliver the solution.

Diving Deeper

Each requirement needs further elaboration to establish its depth, completing its definition:

  • Supporting assets, such as technical specifications, policies, standards, process maps and business rules definitions, are available and can be referenced from the requirement
  • Clear, testable acceptance criteria define the evidence used to assess that the requirement has been successfully met

A full requirements catalogue can quickly resemble a database rather than a single document. When implementing Cygnum solutions, CACI use Jira and QMetry to model requirements, collaborate, link assets together and manage processes such as approvals, change and traceability through testing.

If you cannot clarify requirements to this extent ahead of engaging with a supplier, the exercise needs to be accounted for in the implementation plan. CACI recognise the value to customers and the delivery team in collaborating on this, as this assures a shared understanding of requirements. The Shape step of CACI’s FUSION delivery methodology explicitly provisions for this activity under the Discover phase.

Once complete, you have a solid foundation for solution design and delivery. It would be prudent to re-baseline to reflect this milestone, such that there is a clear distinction between what was agreed at the time and subsequent change.

Better Outcomes

We believe that defect-free delivery to you is achievable when your requirements are clear, accurate and complete. Before handing a solution over to you for acceptance, we run system test cases against your acceptance criteria and evidence the results, providing full, objective traceability that your requirements have been met.

Your time should be focused on value-add activities, such as user acceptance testing against your business processes.

Celebrating a successful, on-time transition into live service is the outcome we all want to achieve and is distinctly more likely when a structured approach is adopted.

Cygnum from CACI used by TfL as competency management solution for London Underground drivers

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Cygnum from CACI used by TfL as competency management solution for London Underground drivers

CACI is pleased to announce that its Cygnum solution is now being used by Transport for London (TfL) to support the competency management process for its 4,500 London Underground drivers.

Cygnum is designed to assist organisations in all aspects of their workforce management, from scheduling and competency management, through to training and recruitment, helping to keep appropriately skilled, experienced and qualified staff performing tasks. Cygnum will assist TfL in gaining a holistic view of the ongoing competencies of its London Underground drivers.

“We’re delighted that TfL has chosen our Cygnum software to underpin the ongoing competency management of its tube drivers,” says Ollie Watson, Group Business Development Director at CACI. “We’re looking forward to continuing to work closely with TfL on its Cygnum solution to help ensure that its competency management programme is run efficiently and effectively into the future.”

For more information on Cygnum and how it supports businesses, please visit https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/

The high socio-economic cost of adverse childhood experiences

Posted on: 3 May 2023
The high socio-economic cost of adverse childhood experiences

“There is an urgent need to better understand the cumulative impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on health outcomes across the life course, integrating epidemiology with fields including epigenetics, immunology and neurology. Equally, there is a critical need for knowledge on how services can become more trauma-informed, what impact trauma-informed service delivery can have, and how services for children and families affected by child maltreatment, substance abuse, domestic violence or incarceration, for instance, can be better integrated to provide a cohesive offer.” The Lancet Research Report, Volume 6, Number 11, November 2021

The annual cost associated with the nine health conditions, including violence and four health risks resulting from ACEs, has been estimated at £2.2 billion per annum in Wales.

In several service areas, notably education and youth offending, there is emerging awareness of the impact of trauma upon populations. However, there is limited evidence of the cost effectiveness of trauma informed service interventions and, therefore, there are difficulties in building and sustaining such services, including prevention. This is in part due to the variation in definitions and understandings of trauma and trauma informed practice. More work remains to be done on this emerging area of practice.

Further, there is a challenge in applying research to real lives. The 10 flat ACE categories fail to account for wider adverse experiences and the cumulative and dynamic effects of adversity and associated trauma, as noted by Dr Alex Chard in his 2021 paper, Punishing Abuse. Similarly, service assessment tools have typically failed to fully captured the age timeline details and context of historical adversity and trauma events. This adds to the difficulty of seeing where needs have not been identified earlier and where unmet needs interact with earlier vulnerabilities such as with universal service environments, decisions and outcomes.

Further, point in time screening and assessment tools do not allow an evaluation of the difference that can be made by applying trauma awareness, skills and approaches in support services as well as specialist interventions such as enhanced case management (ECM).

The findings from the recent public health research, Tackling ACEs: State of the Art and Options for Action, point to further adaptations that can be delivered to allow structured recording of adversity and trauma experiences to be more fully and consistently used to provide feedback to service leaders. Further, these arrangements can overcome the practical and ethical problems associated with ACE screening and enable routine reporting and evaluation of efforts to respond to adversity and trauma, for example in youth justice (and perhaps virtual schools) services. The same arrangements can also facilitate effective and sustained multi agency prevention around universal services in education.

However, it seems that children’s services at this time experience significant challenges in implementing statutory safeguarding and other statutory services for Children Looked After and Special Educational Needs. Many service areas are generating high costs without achieving better care or outcomes. Alongside this are workforce challenges of retention, sufficient stability and consistency of skills. Whilst these issues demand leadership time they can also draw attention away from developing the necessary longer term aligned service solutions.

So, what can be done against this backdrop? At CACI we accept that technology can make a significant contribution to the challenges, however, where and how information management is applied, implemented and supported can make a difference to facilitating and ameliorating outcomes or, in fact, becoming part of the problem, for example being overly focussed on process efficiencies to reduce staff and silo costs versus enabling aligned, coordinated and sustained effective multi professional relational helping capability.

The public health research makes evident the very significant long-term socio-economic costs that include:

  • Avoidable costs of social care and health services
  • Increased costs of special educational needs
  • Harm to individuals and communities from anti-social behaviour, violence and other crime
  • Loss of human capital and educational potential
  • Lost cost from providing services not aligned to reducing adversity or ameliorating harm
  • Lost taxes and productivity through lower economic activity, ill health and early death

Further, the recommendations are clear about the need to capture child development and real life adversity and trauma event data alongside service responses and child journeys. The overarching goal will be to use this data operationally to discover where tailored multi service practice responses to individual, familial and local community issues and contexts deliver a sustainable positive impact.

“Increasing the methodological consistency of data collection, particularly in children, would help to promote early prevention, inform the provision of support, evidence the impact of prevention, and evaluate progress.” Tackling ACEs: State of the Art and Options for Action

A key challenge is achieving the alignment of universal services, effective multi professional prevention and early help responses.

Population data is increasingly available about the high costs of adversity and trauma accrued over the life course and could be considered in guidance, oversight and regulation of individual service decisions and options. This can be the next challenge for information system designers.

The importance of an exceptional patient level costing solution

Posted on: 24 April 2023
The importance of an exceptional patient level costing solution

Costing teams within NHS healthcare organisations can play a vital role in identifying inefficiencies and cost improvements that will enhance services. This means they deserve an exceptional Patient Level Costing Solution (PLICS) that will not just handle the NCC submission, but will also give them the tools to flourish in several other capacities from making meaningful decisions to developing internal reports that will consistently validate these decisions and benefit both healthcare professionals and patients daily.

But what makes an exceptional costing system? And why exactly is it so important? That’s what we’ll discuss in this blog so you can make an informed choice on what you should be getting out of your PLICS solution.

What capabilities should you look for in an exceptional patient level costing solution?

If you want your PLICS system to be considered exceptional, these are the capabilities that you should be looking for:

Accessibility & ease of use that encourages self-sufficiency…

Ease of use is key to assessing how good a costing system is – your costing system should help your team be more efficient not hold them back. Your costing team should be able to run calculations quickly so that they can maximise their time analysing the data rather than exhausting their efforts trying get the data in a comprehensible form.

…no matter what level of technical skill you have in the team

Another sure sign that you have an outstanding costing system is that it is an end-to-end solution that can be easily accessed by any team member with any technical skill level. This helps the process of migration and implementation through to data dissemination be as seamless as possible. A solution that’s customised and flexible in its design will encourage all team members to use it regularly to continuously meet NHS needs and challenges as they arise.

Simple & successful National Cost Collection (NCC) submissions

As well as being compliant to meet your annual costing return and meeting the National Cost Collections and PLICS submission requirements, an optimal costing system will also include the tools and supplier support to make the often-onerous submission process as simple as possible. The value of an experienced supplier supporting you through the process cannot be overstated, as this means you can be confident in your team submitting on time and without errors no matter its size.

Insights & analytics that are accurate & reliable

Another feature of an exceptional costing system is that it is capable of easy integration with your organisation’s wider analytics platform or strategy. Your costing system should act as a reputable source for sharing data widely, both across your organisation and, most importantly, with ICS Partners. The more secure and trustworthy the analytics you can integrate, the easier it will be for your costing team to collaborate with members of the ICS on treatment cost analysis and the impact of recovery plans.

Low cost, high return on investment for your organisation

Do you find your team spending excessively on a solution that causes frustrations or complications? An outstanding costing solution will be of reasonable cost to your organisation and simplify your experience, resulting in a high return on investment and low total cost of ownership (TCO).

Why the quality of your costing system matters

An exceptional costing system creates a reduction in unwarranted variations and will help your team orchestrate strategic service transformation through insightful analysis of the costing data. It will also encourage an information-driven culture and increased data literacy not just within the costing team, but across the organisation. This will help NHS organisations secure healthy financial positions and deliver optimal outcomes.

Adopting and implementing a state-of-the-art costing solution like Synergy is not as challenging as you may think. The long-term benefits of doing so far outweigh the short-term feelings of uncertainty so is something you should consider when thinking about a potential upgrade to your existing system.

If you’d like to find out more about how a new and improved costing system could help your organisation, please contact our expert, Susan Brooks. or take a look at Synergy, our PLICS System and what our customers have to say about it.

The Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust uses synergy as its main costing engine

Posted on: 17 April 2023
The Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust uses synergy as its main costing engine

The Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust use synergy, CACI’s NHS patient level information and costing system.

” The Trust now produces regular quarterly SLR/PLICS information. CACI’s synergy has given the Trust a powerful platform to produce and share this information at patient level, incorporating both income received and cost incurred in the delivery of the care at patient level. The Trust also uses this information to produce further productivity measures to show how each service lines are performing pre/post COVID. As we continue to improve the internal data quality of the underlying information there is an immense appetite within the Trust to use the Trust SLR Pack supported by the CACI’s very powerful Dashboards for the day today performance management of the service lines. CACI’s synergy platform and a very expert support team has provided an ideal platform to develop the usage of PLICS/SLR information within the Trust. The Trust continues to be very excited with its partnership with CACI.”

Attiq Ahmad, Service Line Reporting Lead
The Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Effective workforce management – training and competency management

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Effective workforce management – training and competency management

Ongoing training and competency management efforts are vital for organisations in maintaining effective service delivery. Keeping staff competent, via mandatory ongoing training for their role, is often a regulatory issue. Offering staff opportunities to expand upon their core competencies makes the same process beneficial to the development of your workforce.

Whilst training and competency management are closely linked, there are some differences.Training and competency management

Training management

Certain training courses are mandatory in most professional environments. For example, offices require a number of trained first aiders and fire wardens. Such training needs refreshing every three years, so having staff with those competencies in the office requires them to be trained on an ongoing basis.

In more public facing and safety critical roles, ongoing mandatory training in aspects of health and safety is required. Not fulfilling these training obligations leaves firms at risk of staff carrying out their tasks improperly.

Keeping on top of these courses is vital. A central system helps firms to set reminders and book in mandatory courses for their employees. Such a system can also help to keep track of attendance, ensuring that courses have been attended and completed.

Using the same system, organisations can also make their training courses open to their employees for them to book onto when it suits them. This makes your training management more flexible and opens up training opportunities to employees who may find them interesting. By offering the opportunity to expand on their professional interests, training management can help with staff morale and career development.

If you can train and bolster the competencies of your existing workforce, it makes life easier if you need to move staff around tasks to keep project and service delivery on track during times of strain.

Running training courses also incurs an expense. It makes sense to monitor attendances and interest in certain courses, so that you can offer tailored and more relevant courses to your workforce. Where spaces are likely to be free in arranged courses, having robust oversight of this enables you to open course registration within your organisation, or even sell spaces to other industry firms, the employees of which also need to attend such a course.

Competency management

Competency management is closely, even inextricably, linked to training management. Where it differs in the first instance is in the recruitment of new employees. If an employee says they have the necessary qualifications to fulfil the role for which you are employing them, competency management is the simple act of ensuring that they are indeed appropriately qualified.

For example, if you’re employing someone to do a driving job, it’s prudent to check that they have a driving licence. Where competency management would link with training management in such a scenario would be if you need that employee to further their driving credentials at a point in the future. So, for example, you may need to enhance their competency and send them on an advanced driving course.

Ongoing training plays a crucial role in competency management, too. As mentioned above, in many industries ongoing training is mandatory. This keeps your workforce competent for the tasks that you need it to be competent for.

Where competency management extends this is by linking to performance. If a certain employee is involved in a certain number of similar incidents, it can be a good idea to try and find out why and assign them to an appropriate training course. This means that you are taking reasonable steps to provision for both employee and customer safety, whilst also keeping your services running smoothly.

Assessing staff competencies on an ongoing basis, therefore, is crucial. In the same way that you would schedule an employee, assessors need to be scheduled to staff members and teams to periodically check their work. On the rail network, for example, such assessments take the form of an assessor conducting a ride along with a train driver to check that they are carrying out their job appropriately.

If all is well, this can be logged instantly in a central system. Similarly, if errors are detected, these can be logged instantly, with any follow-up tasks, such as another assessment or the requirement for further training, being actioned straightaway. This helps to ensure that the competencies of your staff are covered, whilst linking directly to your training management for mandatory and remedial courses.

Maintaining a central database of your workforce and its competencies fundamentally helps you to ensure that your have the right people performing the right tasks. A robust competency management framework benefits your scheduling efforts, too, since your administrative teams responsible for scheduling can assign tasks with peace of mind that those employees being rostered are appropriately qualified and/or experienced for the role to which they are being assigned.

Furthermore, a central competency management system feeds into other areas of your organisation. In being able to swiftly and accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses of your workforce, you can make informed decisions in other areas such as recruitment.

Training management and competency management for your entire organisation

The benefits of having robust training and competency management across your organisation are clear. Fulfilling mandatory ongoing training obligations whilst at the same time opening up opportunities across your workforce to expand upon their competencies is hugely beneficial.

Keeping staff competent is one thing but offering career progression boosts morale and helps to keep staff working for your organisation rather than having to seek opportunities elsewhere.

Ultimately, your workforce is your point of project and service delivery. Maintaining and understanding the array of skills and experiences drives effective and efficient delivery. Plugging this into other areas of your business, such as scheduling, enables your organisation to be agile in the face of short-term changes and responsive in remedying medium and longer term issues which are more easily identified with a bird’s eye view of your workforce.

Getting your training and competency management frameworks to dovetail will help drive understanding of your workforce, which in turn will help effective and efficient deployment to projects and services.

CACI has recently published a whitepaper, Effective workforce management to improve outcomes across your business which explores this topic in more detail. You can download your free copy here.

Fatigue management – a matter of life or death?

Posted on: 27 March 2023
Fatigue management – a matter of life or death?

Fatigue management regulations are implemented in the rail construction industry to ensure not only that workers are treated fairly, but also that they are sufficiently rested to carry out what can often be dangerous jobs which require full focus and attention. Any impairment to their work can result in expensive mistakes, injury and, in the most extreme circumstances, death.

Having components of any given job improperly carried out can be an administrative headache that sets work back days, weeks or even months, and can potentially have severe knock-on safety consequences. The chance of human error leading to this is heightened when workers are fatigued, so deploying a tired workforce makes little sense.

DEFINING FATIGUE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

The Health & Safety Executive describes the consequences of fatigue as follows:

Fatigue results in slower reactions, reduced ability to process information, memory lapses, absent-mindedness, decreased awareness, lack of attention, underestimation of risk, reduced coordination etc. Fatigue can lead to errors and accidents, ill-health and injury, and reduced productivity. It is often a root cause of major accidents e.g. Herald of Free Enterprise, Chernobyl, Texas City, Clapham Junction, Challenger and Exxon Valdez.

The implications of fatigue can be vast and, like any other hazard in the workplace, fatigue needs to be properly managed.

This is something that was brought home to the rail construction industry earlier this year when Renown Consultants Limited was fined £450,000 by the Office of Rail and Road, with £300,000 in costs as well, for failures in managing its fatigue protocols which resulted in the tragic deaths of two of its workers when they crashed their van on the way home from a job.

For safety critical work, there is a requirement that there must be a minimum of 12-hours rest between booking off a turn of duty before booking onto the next. Having this requirement is one thing, actively implementing it is another.

IMPLEMENTING, ASSESSING AND MANAGING FATIGUE PROCEDURES

Many companies do not have adequate systems in place for monitoring and implementing fatigue management procedures. In the case of Renown it was noted that, “Operations and managers knew what they were supposed to do in relation to fatigue but lip service was paid to these systems. Senior operations cut corners.”

This is where technology can help firms, with procedures modelled into business systems that can plan, guide and monitor staff, ensuring fatigue is always being considered. Rosters and shifts can be planned in advance based on the work to be carried out. The systems can include rules to consider factors related to both the time of the day that the shift is occurring and the travel time involved for the staff to potentially be deployed. This helps prevent allocation of resources to jobs that contravene the 12-hour rest period because of the travel time to get to or from the job.

There also needs to be improved recording of shifts, overtime and any shift swaps that have occurred. A management system can help by allowing staff to confirm or clock actual time spent, which again may trigger a knock-on warning for future planned work from rules configured to consider fatigue. The Office of Road and Rail (ORR) have also said that companies should be far more proactive in talking to staff and finding out their own concerns on fatigue and how it is affecting them. This could be done by capturing information directly onto questionnaires within a system. When completed these can automatically be flagged for management review and any remedial action required can be instigated, with all information stored against the staff record.

Capturing all this information into a single system allows risks to be automatically flagged to planners. They will then be able to amend and adapt the rosters based on the information presented to them. Having this data to hand ensures companies can comply with their risk assessment guidelines and not plan jobs when they do not have resources to safely do so.

SAFETY FIRST

The ORR was also critical of companies accepting jobs without carrying out proper risk assessments as to whether they have the staff to carry out a job safely. Having systems that can model ‘what if’ planning scenarios to indicate whether it is safe to accept work based on all elements of a risk assessment helps this decision making.

Furthermore, if accidents do occur, having auditable systems in place demonstrates that correct risk assessments were undertaken, helping pinpoint causes quicker and helping co-operation with any third-party investigations.

The RSSB has highlighted that fatigue is a factor in some 20% of high risk accidents in the rail industry. This high percentage suggests that many firms are underestimating the seemingly intangible impact of it. Implementing robust management procedures around this will help firms to see the full scope of the problem and align their workforces correctly to mitigate it.

It makes no sense from a financial, personal or moral standpoint to facilitate fatigued workers carrying out intensive, dangerous and important work. Deploying the correct technology is a major step in the right direction.

For more information on CACI’s Cygnum software, which helps organisations to gain a holistic view of their workforce and processes, please visit: caci.co.uk/cygnum.

The importance of communication in rail safety

Posted on: 24 February 2023
The importance of communication in rail safety

A collision between a train and tractor in Kisby highlights the importance of training, briefing and communicating with all workers and operators to enhance rail safety.

Setting out safety guidelines and effectively communicating them with the workforce is paramount to creating a safe and accountable working environment. If staff aren’t briefed on safety procedures and processes whilst conducting their work, then mistakes are likely to happen. This was brought into focus on 19 August 2021 when a freight train collided with agricultural machinery being towed by a tractor at 04:10. The incident happened at Kisby, at a user worked crossing. The train was travelling at 66mph. So, how did this happen? 

According to the report released in October 2022 by RAIB (Rail Accident Investigation Branch), the accident occurred because the driver of the tractor didn’t telephone the signal operator to check that it was okay to cross. Rather, they assumed that it was safe to look at the tracks to determine whether or not a train was approaching. With the train travelling at such speed, they didn’t see it, resulting in the collision. 

Firstly, the incident could have been significantly worse. The train driver sustained minor injuries in the collision, with the driver of the tractor uninjured. From a collateral perspective, the locomotive and one wagon derailed, whilst the rail infrastructure sustained significant damage. 

The cost of repairing the infrastructure, whilst not noted in the RAIB report, will have been significant, whilst there’s also the time the section of rail will have been out of action for to take into consideration. The stretch of line of was out of action for four days whilst the train was recovered and the tracks were repaired. This will have resulted in delayed and cancelled services. 

A Class 66 locomotive, the type of locomotive involved in the accident here, has a value of around £1.5m. This is based on GBRf spending £50m on a fleet of 37 such locomotives in 2014. It’s fair to assume the repair bill won’t have been cheap.  

The short-term planning, to assign engineers at short notice to track repairs, will have taken them away from other projects on the rail, resulting in other projects being affected by this incident. This, too, will have had cost implications, as well as creating scheduling issues for engineering workers, since their rosters will have had to be re-jigged. 

It’s clear that the cost, time and resource implications of this incident were vast. That’s before taking into consideration just how much worse the incident could have been.  

In its report, RAIB notes that the driver of the tractor wasn’t aware of the requirement to phone the signal operator to check it was safe to cross. They had not been briefed. RAIB concludes that this is most likely a result of the land owner on either side of the crossing failing to brief users of the crossing in a way which resulted in its correct use. Rail staff were unaware of this until shortly before the incident. 

So, significant upheaval, in terms of time and cost, was created because of a simple lack of communication and safety briefings. How can such a situation be avoided? 

Having the ability to evidence that training has been delivered, briefings have been given and that communication is recorded, is a major step in the right direction. The RAIB report notes that they were unable to find evidence of any call from the tractor driver to the signal operator, nor that the tractor driver had been briefed on the need to do so. Creating an evidence trail of such activities enables organisations to determine where failings have occurred and rectify them, preferably before an accident happens.  

The technology exists to underpin such processes. Keeping a robust record of training and briefings can help to ensure that incidents such as this are avoided. And they are a lot cheaper than repairing a Class 66 locomotive.  

Complete workforce management solutions can support your training, competency management, recruitment and scheduling. This helps organisations to keep a complete audit trail of activities, ensuring that tasks, such as safety briefings, are conducted. Human error, however, is inevitable, so they can also assist in the short-term rescheduling of staff to emergency activities such as track repair in the wake of such incidents.  

Operating the UK’s rail infrastructure is a complex process which requires the monitoring of several moving and independent parts, as this incident highlights. It involves everyone from land owners to rail operators and anyone who needs to cross the tracks. Keeping tabs on the communication with all parties is difficult. Having a system in place to record communications and aspects such as safety briefing enables operators to keep track of who needs to know what and when.  

The cost of not having such a system in place can run beyond the financial. The incident at Kisby could easily have been a fatal one. Is it acceptable that such an avoidable incident occurred through simple ignorance of the required process for safely crossing a railway track? The process can be managed and alerts can be created to ensure that everyone receives the briefings they need to receive. The cost of not doing this can be far greater than the cost of implementing the software that helps to avoid such incidents.  

For more information on CACI’s Cygnum software, which helps organisations to gain a holistic view of their workforce and processes, please visit: caci.co.uk/cygnum

Working with providers to help your procurement process

Posted on: 2 February 2023
Working with providers to help your procurement process

What does a good procurement process look like? Something we often see in the market are knee-jerk reactions. A problem within an organisation has been identified so a tender has gone out to market in a bid to rectify it. Whilst this can work, it pays to have an intimate understanding of what your problem is, how you would like to solve it and the impact the solution will have on your team and the future of your service.  

Ultimately, understanding your procurement needs is the first step of your new project.  

Once understanding is established, it makes life a lot easier (for you and a provider) when the implementation phase of the project gets underway. 

Understanding procurement to understand the project 

At CACI, we use our proprietary FUSION project management methodology to underpin every implementation that we deliver to customers. The first phase of this is to shape the project. Working closely with your team, we establish what the project will look like, what your needs are and what success will look like. This is the stage where buy-in needs to be established across your teams, from management to end-user levels.  

Having a fundamental understanding of why you’re purchasing a new technology solution makes this stage far more straightforward. It’s very difficult to elaborate on vague concepts and ideas. 

Helping your chosen technology provider to help you is half the battle: 

  • What are the long-term, strategic aims of your service? 
  • What areas of practice do you need the technology to assist with? 
  • How will it positively impact your team? 
  • How you will resource the project internally? 
  • What timelines are you aiming to achieve? 
  • How will training be conducted? 
  • How will the system handle departures and new starters? 
  • What do you want the system to look like in five years’ time? 

Starting with the why 

What do you want and why do you want it? It sounds like such a simple question, but a failure to grasp this point creates major issues over the lifecycle of a project. It makes it difficult to obtain buy-in internally, whilst making it difficult to explain to a provider what you need their technology to achieve for you. 

This needs consideration of everyone involved, from those responsible for the procurement through to those who will be working with the technology and service users. Across this spectrum, what does good look like? 

This is when knee-jerk reactions can hamper the success of a project, where it is deemed to be important to be implementing a system in response to a situation, rather than considering the value proposition and impact of new software thoroughly. If a decision has been made in haste, without due consideration as to how it will impact end users and service users, then the definition of success will likely deviate from the originally intended definition. They may well feel that the existing solution works well for them, too. Change management is another important consideration from the outset – FUSION change management. 

It is also important to understand your existing technology infrastructure. Often we see cases of competing influences within an organisation, whereby a decision is made as to the infrastructure based upon cost and/or convenience for the IT team. Whilst these are undoubtedly important considerations, it can leave organisations relying upon software which doesn’t meet the required outcomes for staff and end users. 

Understanding why you need new technology and focussing on those outcomes, before taking a tender to market, helps the lifecycle of the project. 

How CACI can help 

If you are looking for new solutions, it is worth speaking to providers before entering a formal procurement process. Of course, procurement needs to be conducted along specific guidelines set by your organisation but speaking to providers to gauge an understanding of their technology and how it might benefit your organisation is a good idea. 

Furthermore, at CACI we have worked with countless customers on implementation and project management. We developed FUSION based upon the understanding of project delivery accrued  over thousands of projects. We can work with you and your team outline how the project would be developed and delivered, outlining each step to help you achieve project buy-in across everyone affected. 

Procurement frameworks 

The final step, once you’ve understood what the project is and what success will look like, is understanding how you can procure. CACI is listed on several public service procurement frameworks. Going through this route can help to avoid lengthy tenders and legal wrangling over contracts. Talking to providers in advance will help in gathering this knowledge so that once you’re ready to move, the procurement process runs as smoothly as possible. 

One workforce and the success of ICSs

Posted on: 31 January 2023
One workforce and the success of ICSs

Bringing together healthcare services within an area to the betterment of patient care is the central aim of integrated care systems (ICSs). We’ve explored how technology can support interoperability of services in a previous blog. Here, we’re taking a closer look at the one workforce idea and how it can be implemented and support patient care across an ICS. The workforce, after all, is the frontline of patient care, so ensuring that everyone is scheduled appropriately and efficiently, is competent for the jobs to which they are being assigned, have ongoing training opportunities and that recruitment is working to strengthen the areas that need strengthening, is vital.

Bringing all this understanding together in one place requires the interoperability of systems that we’ve explored previously. Data and information sharing between different facets of the ICS is crucial to meeting so many aspects laid out by ICSs, including the one workforce ideology. It’s impossible to envisage everyone using the same technology system, so the ability for systems to interact with one another, or share data into a central repository, will be essential in understanding the workforce across an entire ICS.

Right people, right place, right time

Shift work is commonplace in the health industry. Effectively rostering people within applicable regulatory guidelines is one part. Understanding shift patterns, who will be where and when, opens opportunities to create insights into work patterns and more effectively deploying staff across an ICS.

For example, the agency versus bank staff debate is never far from the surface, with the added expenditure but increased flexibility of agency staff being utilised to fill gaps. Is there a more efficient way of rostering bank staff to available tasks? Creating insight that drives efficiency in this way will help to reduce expenditure.

Technology will play a fundamental role in this via auto-scheduling and suggestions based upon staff profiles. Auto-scheduling reduces administrative time on assigning staff to tasks, creating efficiency and freeing up administrative time to focus on other areas.

With the aim of sharing staff to fill in short falls elsewhere in an ICS, technology will have to be implemented to support this, otherwise it will be almost impossible to achieve. Checking available resources across an ICS can be done manually, or via spreadsheets, but requires significant resourcing in terms of personnel and time. Implementing effective scheduling software, that supports the aims of the ICS, will be crucial.

Training and integration

Of course, agency staff will always have a role to play, and their integration into their department is crucial to them being effective. Clear management of them and their roles will ensure that they achieve the results required of them.

This also plays into bank staff. What training opportunities are available to them? Career progression within the healthcare industry is outlined in the implementation of ICSs, so understanding the skills, experience and qualifications of staff will help in suggesting training opportunities to them that can help them evolve an advance their careers.

Having a central record of staff, running parallel to scheduling, creates these insights into your workforce. Upskilling from within is often more cost effective and more efficient than recruiting from outside. It also helps to keep your workforce upwardly mobile and motivated.

Operating training courses, too, goes beyond upskilling and retraining to ensuring that mandatory ongoing courses are undertaken by staff where appropriate.

Competency management

This plays into the competency management efforts across an ICS. Whilst similar to training and workforce management, competency management is a specific function which ensures aspects such as mandatory training courses are delivered. It also helps to ensure that appropriately skilled, experienced and qualified staff are undertaking specific tasks.

This is relevant to the deployment of agency staff, too. Do they have the necessary skills to carry out the tasks that you need them to? Against the idea of pooling resources across an ICS, competency management will play an important role in matching skills to vacant tasks.

It is all part of creating a thorough and robust understanding of the workforce across an ICS, which will help create flexibility and efficiency.

Recruitment

Another aspect of the one workforce philosophy is the creation of a pipeline for the future workforce. Recruitment is central to this, with one aim being working more closely with local schools, colleges and universities to engage with young people who might be interested in a career in healthcare.

By creating relationships in this way, ICSs can promote careers within them. Also, there is always a need for ongoing recruitment into senior roles. By having a holistic view of the workforce, understanding recruitment needs is made easier via identifying skills, experience and availability issues. Where these gaps cannot be plugged by sharing staffing resources, outside recruitment is inevitable.

Is this more efficient than relying on agency staff? What are the timescales? What training will new recruits require? How much management time will be diverted to the recruitment process?

By having a bird’s eye view of your entire workforce, making calculated decisions is easier. This then helps to understand and justify the decision to recruit or use agency staff.

Conclusion

Technology will play a central role in implementing the one workforce philosophy. Having oversight of the entire workforce, in one place, from disparate systems will facilitate the traversing of schedules, availability, skills and experience required to drive efficiency. Creating robust rules and auto-scheduling will improve administrative efficiency; having training and competency management processes in place will help with staff retention and progression.

None of this is possible with a manual way of working. If schedules are managed on spreadsheets, it’s impossible to effectively share them with the wider ICS. Gaining valuable and purposeful insights that can help drive efficiency are also incredibly difficult to achieve in a manual way.

Using the technology that works for you is important. Then making the data that you hold useful across an ICS will help to fulfil the aims of the ICS. Can your technology provider(s) do that?

With comprehensive oversight of staff, their skills and experiences, the one workforce aims of the ICS can be met. It’s one thing focussing on improving outcomes for patients, but improving outcomes for staff is just as important, since they will be the ones driving services and care.

We explore the relationship between ICSs and technology comprehensively in our recent white paper. You can download your free copy here.