Jennifer Howells

What does your role involve? Help staff to understand a bit more about what you do day-to-day.

Jennifer Howells, director for the Finance, Strategy and Transformation Directorate

I have a responsibility to lead a portfolio of functions across the organisation, as well as a collective accountability for NICE as a member of the board and executive team. I also have a responsibility to maintain relationships with colleagues in other organisations to ensure we're able to influence effectively and understand and share ideas and best practice.

I have a really interesting and challenging portfolio. I look after:

Finance: how we generate our income, manage our money and pay our staff.
Procurement: how we source the products and services we need.
HR and organisational development (OD): how we support, reward, recruit and develop our people.
Facilities: how we manage our office environments and support events.
Corporate services: how we support our organisation’s governance, meetings and committees.
Strategy and transformation: how we support the organisation to change how we work and develop and deliver our strategic objectives.

What does your directorate do? Give us an elevator pitch.

We literally make NICE tick! We manage the money, secure the resources we need, support our people, provide facilities and ensure we're well governed. We're also instrumental to the delivery of our strategy.

What makes you proud to lead your directorate?

I am very proud to lead my directorate and, of course, it’s the people that make me proud. Without our services, the organisation would very quickly fall over. Everyone in the Finance, Strategy and Transformation Directorate goes the extra mile to try and deliver the best services we can, because we know that we're relied upon. My directorate is dedicated and committed to doing a great job. We're welcoming, friendly and supportive, keen to help each other, and we work hard to deliver support. We work across the entire organisation, providing those services that are essential to keep the show on the road. And we support the rest of the organisation to deliver the products and services our stakeholders rely on. We're keen to continuously improve, very open to change and always willing to try new things.

Jennifer Howells, director for the Finance, Strategy and Transformation Directorate

Why do you think it’s important that NICE has a new strategy right now?

It's really important for any organisation to have a clear strategy. There are so many important and useful things we can do, but without a clear strategy it's difficult to prioritise where we should focus most of our time and resources. The world is changing ever more quickly and standing still is not an option. We need to change with the world in order to respond to external developments. And to ensure the work we do has the maximum impact on patients and health and care services.

Any strategy needs to be constantly updated and refreshed to make sure we continue to evolve in the way that best delivers value to our stakeholders and, ultimately, patients and taxpayers.

How will the strategy improve the way your directorate works?

It will enable us to better prioritise the work of the directorate, including managing NICE’s financial resources. Our work is key to the strategy. For example, creating diverse committees, facilitating cross organisational working through empowered governance, and reducing bureaucracy. Process improvement also will be key for teams as we adopt continuous improvement methodologies to make our work efficient and effective, through streamlining and automating. We'll also be creating a new business development function to improve income generation.

We will lead our organisational design work to create a more diverse and inclusive culture where people are empowered, work flexibly, and have a focus on delivering performance. The team will develop approaches to embed the delivery of our values and behaviours. This will enable us to attract and develop, diverse, motivated, and talented employees.

Our objective is to enhance the quality, efficiency, and impact of the services we provide to internal colleagues and external stakeholders.

Our values and behaviours will be essential in helping us deliver the strategy

Looking at the strategy content, what will be the top 3 priorities that your directorate will support with?

Developing our people and culture. We'll lead the organisation’s journey towards realising greater empowerment for our people. We'll build skills and behaviours to enable individuals to take greater ownership, building and devolving our organisational accountability. We will lead and champion equality and diversity, so our workforce is truly inclusive. And we will ensure that our facilities fully support the new ways of working.
Enabling organisational effectiveness. Including the streamlining and alignment of processes, people, and technology. Our strategy and transformation unit will build on the work of NICE Connect. And our finance teams will support the delivery of improved efficiency, as well as drive diversification of our revenue streams.
Leading and coordinating the delivery of the strategy! Our strategy and transformation unit will establish the structures and framework that provide oversight of delivery of the strategy. We'll also be responsible for refreshing and updating the strategy so that it remains current.

Our values and behaviours will be essential in helping us deliver the strategy

How will you measure the success of the strategy within your directorate?

We're creating a new integrated performance dashboard with key performance indicators allowing us to measure our progress against these, together with the delivery of the strategy components. This will allow us to report on progress and take early action if things are not quite on track. We're also in the process of producing a transformation delivery plan which, a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, will knit together all the individual delivery plans for each of the strategic pillars.

Within our business process improvement project, we'll measure the improvement delivered. For example, if we've cut out 10% of non-value adding parts of the old process and automated it, we should be able to measure how much quicker it is to complete the full process. We'll also use other measures such as staff satisfaction surveys.

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