NICE Transformation

Aligning to our 5-year strategy

In our 'The strategy: the story so far' feature, our chief executive Gill Leng, touched on how we're adapting to deliver our strategy.

Our transformation programme is key to this, with work happening across 4 vital themes to align us with our strategy ambitions. These are:

• Process improvement: Exactly what it says on the tin! We need to improve our processes by streamlining and standardising them. This will improve our performance, enhance our user experience (internally and externally) and make us overall more efficient in everything we do. The ground-breaking changes happening with the integration of our guidelines is just one example of this. Making them easier to navigate, more accessible, living, and dynamic.
  
  
• Organisational and cultural change: This is where we focus on our people. Our most important asset. This includes collaborative working, creating a positive workplace culture, such as the introduction of new staff networks, and nurturing the skills and capabilities that reflect our future goals. 
  
  
• Digital capability: We’re living in a digital world, and we need to keep up to stay relevant. We must be able to meet the demands of our users, making it easy for them to engage with us. From improving our website search function to using new technologies such as MAGICApp to ‘digitise’ our editorial processes. And this is not limited to our external stakeholders. Our Digital Workplace programme will enhance our internal productivity, user experience and organisational effectiveness.
  
  
• Information, data, and collaboration: Working with our system partners, we need to understand how to maximise the impact our guidance has across the health and care system. Learning to read what the data tells us so we can make sure our guidance grows in impact based on how it's used. This will also help us to overcome health inequalities, hitting those ‘harder to reach’ areas of society and contributing to consistent improvements in health across all areas.

Staying on track

There’s lots to do, with business objectives across various workstreams and teams. You can read more about how our transformation governance model keeps us all travelling in the same direction in Domini Lawson’s blog, ‘Our new approach to transformation governance’.

Working together

It's fair to say that collaboration is the team's 'bread and butter'. It's something they 'relish', and without it they'd end up in a bit of a 'jam'!

The work of our transformation team relies on subject matter expertise, enthusiasm, and quality contributions from colleagues to fulfil their role successfully. In fact, it would be impossible (or at least 'eat up' far too many words) to pick out all of the areas of the business the team work with!

But, when thinking about making change happen, the digital, information and technology, HR and organisational design teams are always highly prominent. They are crucial to harnessing our organisational and digital changes.

Realising the benefits

This way of working is common for transformation projects. And there are plenty of benefits to be had, including:

• sharing skills and resources between teams and projects
• open communications, helping knowledge move through the organisation
• more collaboration, making us more integrated and dynamic with less silo working
• more freedom and accountability.

Collaborative working

Of course, collaborative working is not actually new at NICE at all, especially within transformation work. The NICE-wide consultation project team is a great example of this in action. The team is made up of people from the Centre for Health Technology Evaluation, Centre for Guidelines and Communications Directorate, all retaining their own line managers while working to a transformation project manager.