Developing digital services in health requires all sorts of assurance processes – clinical, technical, information governance and so on. I’ve seen assurance that can range from highly effective and supportive, to being a complete drag on innovation, quality or pace. It all depends on how it is executed.
The worst form of assurance is when teams have to go begging to a governance board of high-and-mighties who have zero knowledge of a product, its users, the research and the tech and design trade-offs made to get the product to where it is. Assurance in this case is just not meaningful, and often defaults to the strength of the relationships between the requester and assurers.
The absolute best form of assurance is when experts are considered part of the delivery team, sharing the same vision and outcomes, and assuring as they go as part of an iterative ongoing process. They can still report to higher-ups, but the decision remains closest to where the knowledge is.
My experience was that during the pandemic, all assurance of the digital services I worked on was the latter by necessity. But it shouldn’t need a pandemic. Experience from across many sectors in Public Digital shows this is a better way.
This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.