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Over a period of years supporting public sector organisations’ support improvement action in corporate teams, especially with HR, Finance and Payroll, one of the most common topics of discussion with Directors and senior managers has been the proper place for payroll functions.

Some years ago, during a conversation with one (American) Chief Executive working in an NHS Trust that was experiencing problems with payroll services, this experienced leader expressed amazement that NHS organisations used outsourced payroll suppliers when ensuring staff were accurately and properly paid was “the most important responsibility of every employer.

Clearly he did not share the view of payroll as a low-value service, an assumption which might underpin the fact that, in UK public services, outsourcing payroll to a specialist provider is relatively commonplace.

Outsourced Solutions

Historically, payroll services have been the most likely corporate service for public bodies to buy-in from another organisation. Seen as non-core function, any in-house service would be viewed as wasting valuable time and money.

In the past, the challenge of legislative compliance combined with high volumes of relatively simple data driving most payroll processes (e.g. absence records, overtime worked, shift payments due) has made outsourcing the payroll function an attractive option.

This approach sees payroll as a”commoditized service” – a simple function which can and should be organised and delivered in the cheapest manner possible with the essential outcomes being payment accuracy and legal compliance.

During a time of austerity and cuts in public services, it seems more fashionable than ever before to outsource such services, having them delivered by a specialist payroll or multi-faceted corporate shared services provider. From 2007 onwards, public services have been seeking cost reductions in support functions by moving these services out to shared services organisations. The expectation for these projects is a combination of simplification, standardisation, automation and economies of scale will reduce costs while maintaining or improving standards. There should be no surprise there are both strong proponents and opponents of these projects, but everyone agrees delivering the benefits is pretty challenging.

For a shared services project to succeed in delivering savings while protecting quality, some fundamental changes are required, with significant review and redesign of functional roles and the business processes they are responsible for. With the trend for considering outsourcing a wider range of  administrative functions, the potential to buy in a combination of “HR and Payroll” or “Accounts and Payroll” is becoming increasingly common. In such cases the perspective of the client organisation about these support functions can be an important driver for the suitability of a particular solution. Read the rest of this entry →

Attractor has been working with an NHS client to support its work deploying  Supervisor Self-Service – part of the Electronic Staff Record (ESR), the national HR and Payroll solution used by almost all NHS organisations in England and Wales.

Following effective change management and process review action, the Trust has now completed the pilot phase, proving business processes work and assessing the extent to which new working practices are both fit for purpose and beneficial.

At the end of the pilot phase, managers using the system have reported real benefits for them in terms of time saving, more effective working practices, access to vital staffing information and greater empowerment with the ability to act quickly on timely information.

Subject to Project Board sign-off, Self-Service will be made available to managers across the organisation in a accelerated launch phase, alongside which the functionality in Manager Self Service will be piloted.

Photo:Flying Fin, Flickr

In our personal lives, we tend to stick with tried and trusted solutions until we are personally convinced the grief involved in learning something new is worthwhile and the benefits we will gain justify all the effort we assume is required to make the switch.

It’s pretty common for people to overestimate the difficulty in switching and many service companies rely upon this reluctance to switch – retaining customers is always easier than winning new ones. This is why companies often prefer to grow their market-share through acquisition rather than organically.

People are right to consider changes carefully. It’s rare to make a switch that involves no “pain”.

Apprehension

Change can be uncomfortable and almost always requires significant effort to unlearn old routines and learn new ways of doing things. While on the “learning curve”, we slip back to being “consciously incompetent” – things are unfamiliar.  We recognise how much there is to learn in the new environment and can become concerned when proficiency seems so far out of reach.

These concerns are magnified when we consider new-fangled practices might be dangerous or risky – just watch anyone learning to swim or ride a bike to observe behaviour that seeks to avoid or delay being asked to leave safe ground.

Given the inertia most people show in their personal lives, why do people expect us to feel differently when our organisations are changing the way we work? After all, we aren’t even the ones choosing to enter into the unknown, “they” are doing this to us and we have no control over what is happening!

In that context, why is it individuals’ reticence or concerns are sometimes treated like difficult behaviour? Instead of “managing resistance”, change projects would benefit from encouraging people to voice and share their worries and concerns, listening carefully to the issues raised and supporting people through their individual learning journeys, tackling area of anxiety and helping them to re-establish their “conscious competence”as quickly as possible. Read the rest of this entry →

Photo : DeclanTM, Flickr

In 2010, Attractor identified some challenges for the future of the NHS Electronic Staff Record (ESR), in particular suggesting the changing strategic picture in the NHS would have a big impact on deployment and implementation of additional features. While the “new look” NHS seems very slow to materialise, a world of increasing decentralisation and delegated authority must call into question the suitability of a national IT solution.

In a sign that Attractor wasn’t alone in identifying this question, the Department of Health wrote to NHS organisations recently, stating a late 2010 review had supported the concept of retaining and expanding the ESR solution from 2014 onwards.

While this strategy will undoubtedly require an appropriate  competitive process at the end of the existing contract, but it seems clear those actively managing the system and the contractual relationship with McKesson consider ESR has a long-term future.

From January through to June 2011, most NHS users of the ESR system will have experienced a major overhaul in the way the system looks and feels as well as significant enhancements in the solution’s functionality and “reach”.

As well as introducing a whole new look for core application users – which has generally been received positively – there are important additional features being introduced for learning management and administration, solutions to many user-identified problems and a move to switch all NHS organisations over to use of smartcards for controlling access to staff records.

These features and the parallel development of the National Learning Management Solution (NLMS) demonstrate the clear view of some who retain the vision that a national IT solution can be an important strategic enabler for the NHS. Unfortunately for many NHS teams, these new challenges have had to be managed at a time when available resources from the Department of Health and locally have been under increasing pressure and some have found it very difficult to make progress with some of the expanded functionality.

Read the rest of this entry →

In the current climate, perhaps it is unsurprising NHS organisations are looking for clear financial justifications for making any investments in projects which will take some time to complete and deliver benefits. When resources are tight and a number of core corporate functions are being subject to scrutiny and pressure, people are not sure there is a financial justification for starting any new work.

Having had the Electronic Staff Record (ESR) in place since 2008 (at the latest), many NHS organisations have deployed self service tools in some shape though few appear to be making full use of all it’s key features.

Too many NHS Trusts have been “piloting” ESR Self Service for a long time, with only a small number of people across the organisation using some of the tools available. This pattern suggests NHS organisations have commenced deployment without a clear strategy or vision about how they want to change the way they work.

Like many large projects, it can be all too easy to fall into the trap of focusing on the technology rather than the desired business change.

Undoubtedly, self service tools face special barriers in a healthcare environment. Not everyone has routine access to a computer and the NHS workforce has been relatively late in adapting to new computing technologies generally. With effective planning however, these challenges can be appropriately addressed and overcome.

In part though, the lack of progress on ESR Self Service reflects an innately conservative approach of corporate teams to the introduction of new technology – possibly not an issue special to the NHS. To the extent that self service encourages devolution of control and decision-making away from corporate centres, it is quite natural for those teams to express concern about risks and potential loss of control.

The combination of hesitant corporate teams, competing priorities, financial pressures and institutional constraints has the potential to make many NHS organisations seem increasingly archaic to “modern” managers from forward-looking healthcare and private industry and a new generation of employees now joining clinical teams from universities – who are familiar with the features of modern self-service technologies including sites like Amazon, Lastminute.com, iTunes and Facebook.

Like many organisations then, the NHS has been relatively slow to implement self service tools in the workplace. It is all to common to hear the business benefits of ESR Self Service have yet to be fully understood or, more importantly, realised in practice. How can this be successfully approached? Read the rest of this entry →

Photo: IK's World Trip, Flickr

In principle, a common competence framework across the NHS and wider Healthcare sector could make a significant difference to employment administration and the overall cost of employment.

The National Occupational Standards developed for health organisations are already available to all organisations and employees, supported by shared workforce systems. These have not been universally adopted however, a step which requires a degree of consensus which proved challenging even when the NHS was managed as a single national organisation.

There is clearly appetite nationally for a skills passport. When NHS PASA conducted research  in this area, 121 NHS organisations responded to a national questionnaire on statutory and mandatory training with the following findings -

• 90% of respondents feel staff urgently need a Training Passport
• 85% feel that retraining staff who have moved from one NHS organisation to another creates needless duplication of training – assessed as equivalent to costs of £74m per annum across England,
• 95% feel that staff who often move jobs ought to have some means of transferring skills that they have developed in statutory and mandatory training
• 85% feel that national agreement is needed regarding the content and level of statutory and mandatory training.

In August 2010, Attractor posed the question “Is it Too Late for an NHS Skills Passport“, the article considered the potential benefits of a more joined up approach across the NHS alongside the challenges presented by an emerging decentralised strategic framework.

Delivering the advantages and benefits of joined up planning and action on workforce skills will be harder as as the NHS gradually de-nationalises.

What can the recent experience of NHS organisations tell us? Read the rest of this entry →

The public sector has a bad reputation when it comes to delivering large change programmes – and many are expressing concern about the capacity of public services to deliver change in a new environment.

Actually, public sector projects are probably no worse than those in the private sector taking into account the impacts of scale, complexity, high public visibility and approach to risk.

In reports going back over 10 years, there have been many criticisms and recommendations for improving the delivery of such major change programmes.

The McCartney report “Successful IT Projects:Modernizing Government in Action” in 2000 highlighted the need to shift away from implementing “technology”, focusing instead on business change which enables an organisations to deliver benefits. It is important to recognise that message applies to all projects, not just those led by technology.

However, even once the called-for improvements in ownership at senior levels and stronger skills and capacity in formal project and risk management being addressed, organisations still find it immensely challenging to bring all the elements together to make successful change happen.

If a project can only be considered successful if it delivers the benefits for which it was initiated it is alarming that IBM’s 2008 study “Making Change Work” found only 41% of projects fully met their objectives while 15% of projects missed all their goals or were cancelled. This is certainly not the only source suggesting many projects fail to deliver on original expectations.

So what makes real “change” so hard? Read the rest of this entry →

The announcement that NHS National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT) was dropping it’s centralised approach – in favour of modular, locally-led solution seemed a long time in arriving.

Following recent decisions to scrap the the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, to cease central funding for the NHS Appraisal Toolkit and not to renew the natonal Enterprise Agreementfor Novell it seems the time for large national IT solutions is over.

With these developments in national strategy, what does the future hold for the Electronic Staff Record (ESR), the integrated human resources and payroll solution used, almost universally, by NHS employers.

Following lengthy testing and pilot site work, the system was deployed across the NHS over 24 months finishing in April 2008.

In retrospect this project seems to be one of the few major IT projects which delivered its results broadly on time and within budget. ESR is now almost certainly the worlds largest employee database and it is surprising the NHS did not broadcast its success more widely.

Through the period 2008-10, work to refine and extend the system’s functionality has continued, now including a wide range of HR, Payroll, Staffing Budgets, Education and Training, eLearning and Self Service. The contract for the system will be reviewed in 2014 and those using the system will be looking at recent developments with interest and, perhaps, some concern.

Read the rest of this entry →

Photo: DeclanTM, Flickr

Attractor was recently asked to support an NHS Foundation Trust with ambitions to deploy both manager and supervisor self-service across the organisation.

Using the self-service toolkit available within Electronic Staff Record (ESR), the NHS integrated human resources and payroll solution, the plan forms part of the organisation’s corporate improvement programme.

Attractor will be providing project consultancy support for the Trust’s management team throughout the life of the project. With support arrangements agreed in principle and the project team beginning to form, work started quickly to develop a robust and detailed project plan.

Activities in the plan will ensure all systems and technical issues, business process review and the stakeholder, communication and other change issues arising are appropriately addressed. This will help the organisation to acheives it’s objectives and secures the maximum possible benefits from implementing new tools.

With preparations for implementation now getting underway, the next key stages of work will involve planning for both anticipated business process review and effective actions to secure benefits realisation.

Front line managers in NHS Trusts have to deliver the optimum deployment of staff to deliver high standards of patient care while avoiding wasteful expenditure.

Using paper or spreadsheets to deliver this involve significant time-consuming and wasteful administration for front-line managers and back office teams alike.

Attractor was asked to help an NHS Trust prepare and plan for a new rostering project – aiming to ensure the organisation would acheive key objectives.

Rostering, Time and Attendance Solutions have the potential to deliver significant strategic and financial benefits to organisations. But delivering those benefits is not easy … they won’t materialise automatically from simply rolling out new tools to all teams and departments. It takes much more than this. Read the rest of this entry →