The beginnings

• In 2013 a paper was written entitled “ICT Provision for e-recruitment, Workforce Information”. It was was recommended that information systems associated with trainees and learners were nationalised. At that point Health Education England was a year old and it’s structure still reflected the legacy organisations e.g. old Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs) and Deaneries..

• 2014 a “business case” was widely discussed and there was agreement that HEE should procure a multi-professional system to replace myriad local systems.

• November 2014 the TIS Programme was project as launched, with an Executive Director (Nicki Latham) as the SRO.  Rob Pink seconded from WES/TV initially part-time.​

• 2014/15 - System Audit - Assessment of systems revealed:​

  • 113 information systems​

  • 62 “industrialised” spread-sheet systems​

  • Cost of £3.2M per annum​

• Early 2015 – Options Appraisal – “ What is TIS”?  This defined the scope., which at the time covered:

  • Directly managed programmes e.g. postgraduate doctors, where we had a requirement to record the specific trainee, and

  • Commissioned Programmes e.g. nurse training, where we had a requirement to record aggregate data.

• May 2015 – Strategic Business Case to HEE Board was approved.

• Summer 2015 - Requirements Gathering phase found:

  • 110+ multi-faceted requirements.​

    Open

    

  • c. 30 functional areas.​

  • Provided the scope and scale of TIS and enabled the production of a Output Specification to inform a procurement planned in November 2015, as the intention (at the time) remained to procure a solution, or set of solutions.

Change of direction

• In November 2015, on the verge of commencing a Department of Health supported procurement, the Cabinet Office intervened. They asked for us to review:

  • Intellectual property (IP) rights and ownership

  • HEE’s capability​

  • Contract length

• The procurement was put on hold and eventually cancelled. We reformed the Programme to review an in-house “build” option, as this would close-off Cabinet Office concerns i.e., we would own IP, we would build our own capability, and remove contract constraints.

TIS Discovery phase

• Jan to March 2016 - We procured a Digital Partner to run Discovery phase to look at the following:

  • User stories to inform first development priorities and verify the findings of the Output Specification (the work originally undertaken in the Summer of 2015).​

  • Technical architecture and other aspects​.

  • Future sourcing and procurement options (Strategy).

Open

Full business case

• Off the back of the Discovery, a Full Business Case (FBC) was written and approved by the HEE Board, the Department of Health and the Cabinet Office.

• The FBC developed the strategic, economic, commercial, financial and management cases for TIS​.

• The scope in the FBC was trainees and learners - note that the “commissioned programmes” was dropped due to wider organisational change. In scope was:

  • Doctors

  • Dentists

  • Pharmacy

  • Scientists

  • Public Health​

• The HEE Board approved the FBC on the following conditions:

  • TIS would be transformational.​

  • TIS will be developed iteratively through time – not “big bang” i.e. agile.​

  • Adopt “Digital by Default” and the GDS Service Standards.​

  • Procure a Digital Delivery Partner to start us off.​

  • Systems will be built in-house where unique, otherwise “buy” i.e. build or buy.​

  • Development Team co-terminus with TIS with a high focus on “the business” and user needs.​

  • TIS will be for the business and user-centric.​

  • Will deliver benefits e.g. rationalisation of our system estate.​

Digital Partner

• June 2016 - We ran a competitive procurement to select a Digital Partner to set us up with the ability to build TIS. Engine Partners (Transform)​ we selected.

• Their broad role was to ​

  • Deliver Discovery by running an Alpha, Beta and Live.​

  • Transfer knowledge and skills to HEE staff to enable self-sufficiency.​

  • To enable HEE to build own products in conformity to the Government Service Design Manual

• This was the type of thing incorporated into the Alpha phase, which covered the first three months to c. August 2016.

• The Beta phase ran until through to November, and covered six sprints, and this a snip of an update…

• As indicated in the above “snip”, we were starting to face the reality of recruiting technical staff at the time. Recruiting to developer roles would be a significant problem, not helped by a national recruitment freeze that curtailed our ambitions.

• We did a lot of work around UCD, the Service Standards and Agile to our users and stakeholders, and headed off a couple of political problems around delivery and the demand for specifications, and the below is an example slide we used.