Tag: Public Digital

Navigating changes at NHS England

An extraordinary day of news on Monday from NHS England*.

My first thought is with former colleagues and officials in the organisation who have been in almost constant restructuring for the last five years. Just when things were starting to settle, the rug has been pulled again. I am sorry for you, folks.

Looking beyond the personal toll, there are undoubtedly some opportunities in here, as long as the leadership takes the right approach. Here are some thoughts on how to get some positives out of a pretty horrible situation for those involved.

Focus on locally-led change

It’s undeniable that there is a massive concentration of people power in the centre. I don’t think many at NHSE realise just how low the capacity is in some parts of the nationwide system. Last year, I worked with one integrated care board which had a single project manager who was the point person for the entire digital portfolio: NHS App, UEC EPR convergence, e-RS, FDP and others. “Build it and they will come” does not work. A rebalancing of some delivery capacity to focus on locally-led change would be helpful. Note, I’m not suggesting product development skills should be devolved to local – the digital agenda that NHSE is grappling with, and the criticality of digital to NHS reform, means NHSE can ill afford to lose further digital specialists.

NHS as a service organisation

Previous NHSE restructures (and I have been through them myself) have taken a salami-slicing approach – trimming a little off of all teams, so you are still left with a complete mess, a slightly more meagre one. A fundamental reshaping needs to take place that leaves you with a workforce that can deliver the strategy. Within this, there is also an opportunity to fix the overall structure of NHSE. I’ve written about this before (in 2019 gulp), but the way NHSE is structured around priorities, without a consistent taxonomy, results in mass confusion and duplication. It means that everyone, everywhere, is trying to solve the same problem – but from different start points and worldviews. NHSE needs to think of itself as a service organisation i.e. one that organises itself around users and their needs, rather than internal communications structures.

NHSE needs to think of itself as a service organisation; one that organises itself around users and their needs, rather than internal communications structures.

Fix pay and recruitment

I assume it is a legal requirement to freeze hiring, while restructure and consultation takes place; this hiring freeze, however, could be an act of self-destruction. Getting new people into NHSE takes six to nine months. NHSE needs to stay on top of the new skills it will need to deliver against priorities. From a people perspective, NHSE also needs to fix pay consistency across national and local. Talented leaders are disincentivised to go out to the system because, simply, the pay is worse. The restructure must be seen as an opportunity to enhance the value proposition to attract key skills, otherwise it will make a challenging recruitment landscape even more so.

Adopt internet era ways of working

Most critically, NHSE needs to make sure that deep digital and data expertise is at the top table. Driving NHS transformation is not just about technical literacy (although it is a critical part of it) but also internet era ways of working i.e. what it means to operate as a modern organisation. This means adopting, and valuing, inclusive and open ways of working that enable trust, operational transparency, and an efficiency of communications that helps spread knowledge.

The NHS is a highly devolved service that needs to be led rather than commanded, as previous efforts, successes and failures illustrate. That’s precisely why taking these opportunities will give NHSE the best chance of delivering not just evolution but the revolution that will be required to modernise an ailing NHS.

*Two days after this article was published the UK Government announced the abolition of NHS England.

This post was originally published on the Public Digital website.

11/03/2025
Goodbye health sector…Hello health, local government and charities!
Public Digital is growing. And through growth comes inevitable change. One of the consequences of that change is that the health team is expanding to encompass local government and charity work too. This is an exciting step forward but also means the end of a small but perfectly formed team of some incredibly talented people.

At Public Digital we celebrate starting things – and we celebrate stopping things too. We always make the space and time to reflect on what has passed – what went well, what could have gone better, and what we’ve learned.

So last week, we spent an afternoon reminiscing about our work over the last four years, so we could give the team a good send-off. This short scrapbook captures some of our memories.

Chris was the first into the team joining Public Digital in late 2020, ostensibly to work on the NHS Providers Digital Boards programme. The image below shows an artefact from Chris’s first week – a sort of ‘mind map’ of key concepts in digital transformation and the GDS story. Essentially a one page version of the PD book Digital Transformation at Scale. It has proven a faithful ally and useful prompt over the years for pithy insights on various aspects of digitally enabled change.

An artefact mapping key concepts in Digital Transformation at Scale

Digital Boards is a programme we still support today. In fact it has just relaunched for a new phase this week. It’s had fantastic feedback from participants, and has taken us and the brilliant NHSP team all over the country.

While PD colleagues were flying to Nigeria, Washington DC, Guadalajara – the health team took in the delights of…

…Scunthorpe (it’s always sunny in Scunny)…

…Ipswich in Matt’s Mother in Law’s drop-top fiat 500…

…many many trips to Norfolk…

… and Chesterfield, where we delivered a session in a tinsel-bedecked room even though it was July. A hangover from on-and-off lockdowns in the early days.

…a Stoke-on-Trent Travelodge and its limited real ale selection…

Delivering a Digital Boards session takes a serious IT rig. Here’s a glimpse of Connie’s set up circa 2022.

Beyond NHS Providers we’ve had many other memorable client visits and experiences in the healthcare sector.

User research is a key part of much of our work. Which includes not just things like usability testing or semi structured interviews but also meeting people where they are. The below photo is from the installation of a GPS pendant for an elderly lady suffering from dementia, the start of our work in the care sector.

Some of our projects tested our artwork skills to their absolute limits. Working on a project with NHS England, we were asked to facilitate a retrospective using the “anchors and engines” structure i.e. what will weigh us down and what will propel us forward. Although we are blessed to work with many great designers in Public Digital, we don’t always have one on hand. 10/10 for effort Matt.

Like the rest of PD, the health team is also blessed with many highly gifted speakers and presenters who represented PD at a whole range of different events. A couple of honourable mentions

Cate speaking alongside the Rt Hon Patricia Hewitt.

Tom presenting at Digital Health Leadership Summit having brought odd shoes. Odd as in, from two different pairs, rather than simply ‘strange’. No one noticed thanks to judicious concealment behind the lectern.

Tom presenting at Digital Health Leadership Summit

As a proud north-easterner by heritage it has perhaps been no coincidence that we have had the privilege of doing a fair bit of work in Newcastle, Durham and Teesside over the years.

One of our meeting rooms in PD is called the Calvert room after Margaret Calvert one of our CEO’s heroes. In the picture above you can see the Calvert Typeface on the Tyne and Wear Metro. Distinguished by its block serifs.

A night with clients in a Newcastle comedy club. Possibly ill-judged in hindsight but gosh it was memorable.

No visit to the north east is complete without a pit pony sighting

As well as stotties in Newcastle…

We’ve also eaten cobs in Nottingham…

…pie barms in Blackpool…

…and parmos in Middlesbrough.

And we’ve run off the calories in New York.

We’ve sponsored brilliant unconferences like Healthcamp…

…found our colleague Saw’s spiritual home…

…and even given Santa a base of operations when he needed one.

We exhibited the strongest of scarf games.

And just look at this suit.

The health team has always had an eye for a natty bit of clothing. Believe it or not these autumnal hues were entirely uncoordinated in advance.

We’ve had some memorable moments with clients over the last four years. We’ve seen a CEO of a several hundred £m organisation fall asleep in our workshop. We’ve travelled hundreds of miles to reach clients only to be uninvited on arrival. We’ve cringed our way through a fair few car crash meetings. But through adversity comes strength and the excellent moments have vastly outnumbered the bad.

Here are just a few of the things our clients have said:
- “[PD’s work] really inspired us as a team and gave us a language to use together to lead transformation.”
- “Thank you so much… you are making such a big difference to people’s lives doing this.”
- “Public Digital are genuine subject matter experts, passionate about the digital agenda, and interested in getting to the root of the real problems.”
- “I get lots of consultancies telling me that they want to do ‘meaningful work’ but I’ve never come across one where every single person so actively, genuinely and obviously means it like the Public Digital team.”
- “This is not a deck that tells us what we’ve told you. It’s full of practical things, starters for 10, and we can all see a clear path for what we need to do next.”
- “We really appreciate all the remarkable work that has gone into the report. Your team has shown genuine care for our organisation and the individuals who you have met. It feels that you have put your heart and soul into the project to provide us with the insights and recommendations to move us forward as we further develop our services for those in need of our support.”
And our favourite of all time.

So goodbye then to the loveliest team any of us could have asked for.

And on to the next chapter.

This post was originally published on the Public Digital website.
25/10/2024
Patient records and the NHS App
Another political administration, another commitment to putting technology at the heart of NHS reform and medical records in the hands of those that need them. If you think you’ve heard this one before, it’s because you have. All of the preceding Conservative Secretaries of State for Health have made similar commitments on NHS digitisation. As did their Coalition and Labour predecessors.

In fact, the story of digital technology reform in the NHS starts all the way back in the 90s with the introduction of the NHS’s first Information Management and Technology strategy. Which said some entirely sensible but eerily familiar things.

“Staff will enter data once and share where needed. Information will be secure and confidential. The NHS will share information using common standards and an NHS-wide computer network.”
(Source: Mark Reynolds, 2023, Digital Health in the NHS)

In a complex network of institutions such as the NHS (the NHS is not one single organisation contrary to popular public belief), sharing data about a person to ensure their continuity of care is self-evidently an essential part of delivering a good service – if it was merely a matter of political will, wouldn’t it have been done decades ago?

The real reason that we haven’t achieved this is due to a series of extremely tricky technical, design, commercial and policy challenges all made more difficult to tackle by misaligned incentives.

How the NHS App displays medical records today

The authors led development of many digital products and services within the NHS, including leading on the NHS App, so are both familiar with these problems as well as invested in its success.

The NHS App already does a number of things but this blog post is particularly focused on the access to medical records.

The NHS App uses APIs to connect to GP Systems, of which there are two dominant market leaders in EMIS and TPP. These APIs existed long before the NHS App, indeed without them the App wouldn’t exist.

In some places the NHS App also has integration with providers of secondary care records such as Patients Know Best. Access to these records is highly dependent on which products and services have been procured locally, and therefore it is not uniformly available across the country.

Given that the GP record is intended to contain your entire medical history, and the fact the NHS App is already connected to all GP records in the country, in one sense this is a solved problem.

But it doesn’t feel solved.

The challenges of the current model

The reason is perhaps that aspects of this solution really don’t work well enough – or they don’t work well enough all of the time.

Firstly, in order to access the full details of your GP record via the NHS App, your GP records needs to have a setting set on the GP’s own system to enable “Detailed Coded Record” access. Without this you will see just a very summarised version of your record in the NHS App. Theoretically from 2023 this setting should be enabled by default, but it’s clear that this isn’t the case with many GPs. To enable this setting on your GP record, you have to contact your GP surgery and ask for it. When we’ve tried to do this for our own records we’ve found that the surgery staff had no idea what we were on about.

There is also a huge usability challenge to overcome. Medical records at their core are designed for professional clinicians and not laypersons. As well as being hard to read due to the technical nomenclature, there are genuine patient safety and usability concerns around presenting uninterpreted data to patients, especially when it comes to diagnoses or test results with significant consequences for patients.

Example of how the Pfizer COVID vaccine shows up in the app.

Furthermore, simply presenting data in lists doesn’t necessarily help a patient understand the journey they are on, or which information is most relevant for their current situation. The same is true for clinicians, who often have to wade through screens of ephemera before finding what they really need.

In the examples above you can see the change in design language when jumping between different systems. This is jarring for users. Joining up user journeys across all the different products sold by different vendors is extremely hard to get right, and requires a muscular approach to shaping the NHS software market that has sadly been lacking.

Under the hood, the interoperability is still not good enough, both in terms of the mechanisms for accessing data, and the modelling of the data itself. The data is pulled into the NHS App via something called IM1, which is a pretty ancient set of API standards that have limited utility.

Better APIs into the core clinical systems do exist, but the vendors charge for access. This is where you run into the politics. EMIS and TPP have their own “patient portals”, and also support an ecosystem of vendor partners that do similar. This is a key part of their business model. So in effect the NHS App is competing with the offers that the 3rd party “patient app / patient portal” suppliers are providing, and many GP surgeries are still using them as their front door and default patient data platform.

In too many cases a ‘let the software market decide’ assumption runs deep within NHSE. Such a posture is in direct opposition to the alignment required to join up patient records.

How to solve these problems

A foundational question in all this, which was the source of some debate on X this week, is “is it possible to solve these problems without fundamentally ripping up the core technical infrastructure at the heart of the NHS and starting again?”

Is it better to work with the model we have, an archipelago of medical data with a central shared view pulling data in from the multiple sources, or is it better to do something radically different where we re-engineer the existing model and create a new national record infrastructure based on data being pushed into a consolidated record which is made available through dedicated API services?

Both models need more analysis, and those analyses should be published so the public can appropriately scrutinise the hundreds of millions that will need to be spent in either context. They must also include a hard look at the existing significant investments in NHS data infrastructure and technology, and resolve any duplicative or conflicting approaches.

Regardless of the technology approach, this challenge won’t be solved through the creation of the perfect architectural diagram.

Whichever route you take there are some other fundamentals that also need addressing:
- Embedding deep experience and technical knowledge in the Centre of the NHS, particularly at the very top table driving commissioning and strategy conversations. This is lacking at present.
- Committing to a long term plan (no, not that one) that remains consistent and is inoculated from political change and cabinet reshuffles.
- Radically reshaping vendor markets. NHSE has too often let the market decide. Enough of that.
- Properly funding and taking a coherent approach to data and open information standards, with a coordinated approach to working with vendors.
- Publishing a clear strategy and roadmap, explicitly linking strategic aims, the work that will contribute to them, and the aligned incentives that will support their success.
Once we see the announcements that will achieve these fundamentals we can look beyond the headlines and get some real hope that things may just be different, this time.

Cowritten with Matt Stibbs and originally published on the Public Digital website.
23/10/2024
How can we get to a single shareable patient record?
If I were a new Secretary of State arriving at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), one question I’d be asking is why is it so difficult to have a single patient record. That is to say: a single source of health information about a person that is available to any health practitioner helping them.

The reasons for this are legion but fundamentally it’s down to two things. Complexity and culture.

The NHS, despite the name, is not one single service. It’s a huge collection of different organisations funded in different ways under different conditions, delivering possibly millions of different services. This is underpinned by a huge mix of software systems both national and local, making the NHS the brownest of brownfield environments for digital change.

As well as institutional complexity, there is also data complexity. Picture a cradle-to-grave data model that minutely describes the human body and its systems, the things that can go wrong, and the treatments available. Add in the fact this data is also highly personal. The technical security and political sensitivity questions are formidable.

Beyond the environmental factors, there are some self-inflicted moves that have slowed progress too. Lurches in NHS technology policy from the top down / outsourced model of NPfIT to thousands of blooming flowers (although flowers is perhaps a generous metaphor in many cases).

From interoperability to convergence and back. Completely different commercial approaches in primary, secondary, or urgent care. And more digital and data strategies than you can shake a stick at. This confused and confusing picture is exacerbated by piecemeal funding cycles driven by announceables that don’t allow for long term planning or foundational enabling work.

But it can be done. It arguably has been, if you look at the success of shared care records like Connecting Care or One London. In the long term many, including me, believe that the best way to deliver this requires a new model where comprehensive health records are organised around patients rather than institutions, based on open data standards. Such models are emerging in some regions and countries, such as Slovenia.

I would ideally like to tell the new Secretary of State to simply swerve the question as elegantly as possible. A single health record is hugely complex, fraught and littered with elephant traps. But on the basis that isn’t politically feasible, here’s what I would say is needed:
- Clear consistent long term strategy accompanied by a credible delivery plan
- Sustainable and predictable funding supporting the development of long standing expert teams
- Bold local and national leadership
- Starting small and iterating, and scaling what’s effective
- More active management of the vendor market in secondary care
- Increased investment in the “plumbing” activities supporting development and adoption of data and interoperability standards
Because no matter how hard it is, there are reasons for optimism. Like many things in the NHS, the future is perhaps here; it’s just unevenly distributed. And because the prize is so big, it really is worth the effort.

This post was originally published on the Public Digital website.
11/01/2024
Public Digital health and care highlights 2023
A few weeks ago in a planning workshop, our CEO Ben encouraged me to post more; thus gifting me a nice and straightforward NYE resolution. It’s not an unfair challenge. Little does he know last January I set myself the personal target of publishing 3 blog posts in the entire year to jolt myself back into a habit. I think I’ve managed one so far. So this is an attempt at being a whole third less useless.

Leading the health and care team at Public Digital for the last 12 months has been another of immense intellectual fulfilment, enjoyment, and pride. Tough problems with great clients. So, here’s a quick note on some of the year’s highlights to end 2023 in the way I want to start 2024.

(1) On the basis you get nowhere in the transformation of health and care without really understanding clinical practice, this year we were delighted to add a doctor to our core team. Not just any doctor though — one that also has a Masters in Design. Welcome Saw. We’ve also done important work to strengthen the technical expertise of our network in areas like population health or provider trust technology.

(2) From a previously predominantly NHS-oriented client landscape we had more client diversity in healthcare this year. And in particular have made strides in the charity space, and social care. Our team is highly purpose driven, so hearing a client report for instance that thanks to our help we “genuinely improved outcomes for children” as part of a safeguarding project we were working on will live long in the memory.

(3) Public Digital is part of a family of companies called kyu. Travelling to meet our health counterparts from the kyu various companies in New York last March was a thrill, and gave me a much better sense of the capabilities we have across the group. I already knew about the brilliant people in IDEO, but the group also has skills in urban design, public affairs, behavioural insights, development, branding and creative, and more.

Chris and Matt at the Governor’s Office, New York City

(4) Although we still do a lot remotely, getting out on the road in the UK has been invaluable to form ever better and more trusting relationships. This year we got to: Barnsley, Blackpool, Bristol, Chelmo, Dartford, Derby, Ipswich, Liverpool, Maidstone, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Northampton, Norwich, Nottingham, Southampton, Warrington, Worthing. And of course lots and lots of lovely old London.

Chris, Jesse, Audrée, and Saw on the road in Newcastle.

(5) This was also a year when we started to think about the intersections between some of our practices within Public Digital. To that end, I’ve been working with my counterpart Emily and her amazing team on healthcare opportunities in the Global South. This included in the latter part of the year, supporting Madagascar to examine opportunities around open source healthcare technologies. Our team was also represented at the Global Digital Health Forum in Washington DC at the start of December.

Connie and Abisola in DC for the Global Health Summit

(6) It wouldn’t be the health and care team without plenty of work in the NHS as well of course, and that has ranged from deep dive assessments into trust digital maturity, to work at the national level on products & services, and getting right back to our roots with a bit of website work thrown in too. We’ve also continued our amazing partnership with NHS England, NHS Providers and NHS Confederation on the Digital Boards program. And we dropped into a handful of the major events of the year. Particular highlights including Cate appearing on a panel with Patricia Hewitt to talk about ICS digitisation, as well as Mike keynoting the NHS Providers conference.

Cate McLaurin presenting alongside Patricia Hewitt at Digital Health Rewired.

Mike Bracken speaking at the NHS Providers conference.

(7) Our client feedback has been phenomenal this year. Lots of it has been variation on the theme that we “show up differently”, and get great results because of it. I like to think of this as internet-era consultancy — borne out of the unique space we occupy between classic consultancy and digital delivery. Amongst it all, my absolute favourite was hearing that “Public Digital have made us into a team”. This outcome is something that surprisingly hard to capture as a deliverable in a statement of work, but is beyond doubt the most value we could ever leave a client.

So there you are. Plenty of highlights, but that’s not to say it’s been universally positive or easy going. The contortions at the centre of the NHS and its ripple effects have made things bumpy at times. But through those experiences, comes wisdom, and resilience. Onwards.

We are PD Health and Care. We generate momentum for radical change by:
- assessing and building digital maturity
- designing digital strategies
- resetting difficult programmes
- building exemplar services
- coaching leaders
- developing teams
- changing cultures
- transforming operating models
If you think we can help you with any of the following give me a shout [email protected].

Merry Christmas everyone. 🎄

This post was originally published on Medium on 19 December 2023.
19/12/2023
A to-do list for the next NHS Director of Transformation
The news broke last week that Tim Ferris, Director of Transformation at NHSE is leaving. I was quite surprised about how relatively quiet the Twitterverse seemed about it, but change fatigue is a forgivable response. The news reminded me of Joe McDonald’s excellent lava lamp analogy to describe the NHS’ constant pattern of reorganisation.

The plans and timeline for appointing Tim’s replacement haven’t been made public yet. Assuming there will be a like-for-like role to step into, the new appointee will have a full in-tray.

Here are six suggestions for what I’d put on the top of their to-do list.
1. Exemplify the NHS England ambition to adopt a collaborative, servant-leadership posture, and establish what the system will solve at the centre, what it will not, and why. Contrary to what you might hear from some quarters, the NHS doesn’t need fewer managers. It needs a different leadership approach, one that strengthens the feedback loop between the system and national teams.
2. Publish and keep updated a single roadmap for national products and services that describe the relevant team’s future approach, the rationale for any major product decisions (e.g. why particular features have been prioritised above others), and how they relate to each other. That roadmap needs to give systems and suppliers confidence in what’s coming, and what they can rely on.
3. Stop the Federated Data Platform procurement until there’s a good answer to the questions posed in the very sensible UKFCI paper. Start working in the open so that people can be brought on the journey and be confident about what’s going to happen with their data.
4. Step into shaping the software market for health. Make this an explicit mission of the transformation directorate, and take a 10-year view. Quietly ditch the EPR convergence mandate, make space for interoperability approaches, and remove the barriers to entry faced by challenger suppliers that are taking iterative, design-led, open standards based approaches.
5. Do less, better. System digital leaders are bombarded with pots of cash, priority requests, exacerbated by end-of-financial year “spend it or lose it” moments. No cash for “innovation” until organisations have put an end to 10 minute login times. Work with wider NHSE and ministers to agree a smaller set of key priorities, and stop doing other things.
6. Give the next administration a plan to allow the long term funding of teams, not projects. Prepare this so it’s in the in-tray of the new administration on Day One.
What would you do?

I’d love to hear your ideas.

And for those in the trenches trying to get the work done – keep going.

This post was originally published on the Public Digital website.
11/05/2023
What does “working in the open” mean?
In Public Digital we often talk to clients about working in the open. We think it’s a key ingredient of successful digital transformation.

What is working in the open?

Working in the open means showing people the work you are doing, as you’re doing it. At a minimum this should be people within your team and people across your organisation. Even better is sharing publicly, with stakeholders outside your organisation who have an interest.

Working in the open is not just about demonstrating progress, but also talking openly about mistakes, changes, and things you’ve learned. It’s partly to support communications, to help you build a movement for change. But it’s also about good governance. It gives stakeholders a window onto your work that drives up quality, helps unblock, and manages your dependencies. Work in the open by being open about the work.

Typical examples of working in the open are as follows.

Hosting ‘show-and-tell’ sessions. A show-and-tell is a regular (every 2 weeks, say) open invite event. The team does a short presentation about recent progress, and allows time for questions at the end. Importantly the team does not simply give a status update but “shows the thing”. Such as prototypes, designs, research, or other lightbulb moments.

Publishing regular updates on the team’s progress. For instance by writing and publishing weeknotes. Or writing regular posts about more specific things as they learn them. This could be a set of insights from user research sessions. Or the logic behind making a particular choice about a technology.
- NHS trust digital leaders Amy Freeman and Andy Callow both publish weeknotes.
- NHS Digital hosts a series of blogs on transformation, technology, and design.
- The Defra Future Farming programme blog.
Publishing code and documentation as open source. When a digital team is developing a digital service or piece of software they should code in the open wherever possible. Publishing code in public repositories helps teams focus on the quality of their code and documentation. It allows others to build or copy the work that has been done.
- GCHQ’s internal Boiling Frogs research paper on software development and organisational change. If GCHQ can work in the open, anyone can.
- NHS design and prototyping kit code repository.
- The Government Digital Services’s code repositories.
Using workplace messaging tools. This is one of the simplest things you can do to help your teams work in the open more. Posting information in a ‘chatroom’ rather than sending an email switches the default visibility of a message from closed (only the people copied get it) to open (everyone in the channel or room gets it). This helps all the team know what’s going on, and allows the team to discuss important topics together. It also allows discussion to happen asynchronously without the need for a meeting.

Richard Pope has published a brilliant thread on twitter of some of the things teams publish in the name of working in the open & transparency.

Working in the open: chat rooms

How does working in the open help

What is the traditional way of communicating?

Traditional methods of project communication typically follow these patterns:
- Broadcast. The communications are one-way.
- Hierarchical. Only the most senior people are allowed to represent the project.
- Tightly controlled. Everything has to be cleared by a separate comms team.
- PR-oriented. The objective is to spin what you’re doing to show it in the best possible light.
- Big bang. One big press release when the work is ‘finished’.
These types of communications are often impersonal, inauthentic, and frankly boring.

Advantages of working in the open

Working in the open is typically low cost and has a number of advantages

It supports better project communications because:
- It builds momentum. Digital transformation is not only about technology. It’s also about changing culture, process and operating models. You won’t be able to do this in a silo. By working in the open, you can develop your narrative and bring people with you. It helps create momentum for change. Sharing what you’re doing little and often increases the chances people will engage, reaching wider audiences.
- It’s 2-way. It allows your audience to interact and converse with you. It opens up a channel for you to receive feedback.
- It is timely and relevant. Avoiding long comms clearance processes enables your communications to happen when the work does. This helps build momentum and keeps you on the radar of key stakeholders: decision makers or funders. Decision makers don’t like surprises.
- It has more authenticity. Working in the open allows you to talk in the voice of the people who best understand the project. Helping people understand why you’ve made the decisions you have builds trust. Like your maths teacher used to say, show your working out.
It supports better project governance because:
- It makes the service better. More eyes and earlier eyes on the service, product or project means it will get improved, more quickly and at lower cost/risk.
- It is a window onto your world. It allows stakeholders a much clearer understanding of what the hell is going on than a Red/Amber/Green status report in 8pt Arial on a slide.
- It manages dependencies. Legacy organisations tend to try and manage dependencies in large spreadsheets. This may allow one person (the owner of the spreadsheet) to understand dependencies. But this isn’t enough. Working in the open allows everyone to see what’s in flight, and identify and manage dependencies for themselves.
- It helps you manage and persist knowledge. It enables you to build an open store of understanding and insight over time about how and why things have been done. This makes it easier for others to copy or pick up where you left off. It allows others to link to what you are doing and explain.
It supports capability building because:
- It helps you hire. Digital professionals like to be able to work in the open. If your organisation can show that it works this way, you will attract more of the people you need. “I asked members of the audience to raise their hand if they wanted to work at GDS after reading one of its blog posts. 75 per cent of people put their hand up.”
- It is democratic. Everyone on the team is empowered to showcase their expertise about what they’re doing and why. This builds confidence in communications skills. It helps everyone feel like they are contributing.
If you want to build trust, confidence, and learning, we suggest you work in the open.

Further guides

More advice on agile communications from Giles Turnbull.

More advice on weeknotes from Giles and Ben.

More advice on running great show and tells.

More advice on doing presentations.

More advice on coding in the open.

This post was originally published on the Public Digital website.
21/01/2022