The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) employs 3600 people across the UK, delivering a range of NHS services to NHS contractors, organisers, patients and the public at a national level. As an Arm’s Length Body of the Department of Health and Social Care they are tasked with managing £35 billion of annual NHS spending. The NHSBSA is leading the digitisation and adoption of cutting-edge technology to deliver value to the taxpayer and savings for the NHS, which are then reinvested into frontline care. At an organisational level, NHSBSA strive to support the NHS and health care system to become more efficient through the development of staff capability and enterprise planning.  

To continue achieving these goals and values, the NHSBSA recognised that they needed to invest in supporting their workforce through change. Previously, change management had often been implemented inconsistently, despite having in-house capability in the form of trained change management practitioners. A consistent and coherent approach to implementing change management was required to comply with Project and Change Management Professional Standards for Government departments and achieve ambitious long- term project outcomes.  

The Change Management Challenge

NHSBSA had just begun a digital transformation journey and the critical nature of their services required them to optimise project delivery and adoption while continuing to deliver first- class services to customers, clients and internal users. This would require upskilling key members of staff to improve the level of technology adoption, ensuring that all project objectives were met, and organisational benefits realised.  

It was recognised that NHSBSA had an inconsistent, ad-hoc approach to change management and required a coherent and structured approach to manage change across the organisation to ensure successful adoption of new ways of working. It was understood that a single consistent approach would enable the organisation to react swiftly to external and internal change, multiplying the benefits across all projects and reducing resistance to new ways of working.  

NHSBSA considered their approach in consultation with Prosci Europe and decided on a role-based training approach, starting with building change capability into the team responsible for delivering projects, eventually expanding the training to enable members of staff to train employees within NHSBSA and improve the understanding of change management with key sponsors.  

Building Organisational Change Capability

Step 1: Certifying the Portfolio and Prioritisation Directorate

In order to improve the application of change management for current and future projects, Portfolio Delivery Leads Andy and Helen recognised that project professionals at NHSBSA needed a consistent framework, tools and change language. It was decided that 16 colleagues from their project delivery team should attend the 3-day Prosci Change Management Certification Practitioner Programme hosted at NHSBSA offices, delivered by Prosci Europe’s expert change management instructors. 

The practical approach to applying the Prosci Change Management methodology allowed participants to embed their learning into their current, in-flight projects. By building a pool of skills within a key department in NHSBSA, projects with high people impact would be delivered with a dual project management and change management approach, increasing the likelihood of successful and enduring change.  

“We have the experience and skills to build, improve, and deliver first-class services to our customers, clients, and internal users, but we wanted to improve the speed at which our services are fully transitioned into use, making sure that all users are pulling in the same direction from the start.”  

Andy Strickland, Portfolio Delivery Lead at NHS Business Services Authority

Step 2: Train-the-Trainer

To further increase NHSBSA’s change management capability and readiness Andy and Helen placed 4 key staff members on the Level 1 Prosci Train-the-Trainer session. The Train the Trainer approach equips certified change practitioners to deliver internal role-based training, developing capability in the organisation, reducing the reliance on external vendors. NHSBSA were able to grow their organisation-wide change capability in a few months due to the flexibility and the teachings of the course, enabling them to future- proof the organisation and secure a consistent change management approach on approved projects.   

In order to train employees within the organisation NHSBSA invested in the Prosci Enterprise License, at the ADKAR Enablement licence level, enabling them to run a number of the one-day Prosci workshops for internal staff, leveraging their own  teachers. The purchase of the license was timed alongside the 4 staff members attending the Train the Trainer workshop ensuring that they could move immediately into delivering their own training and expand internal capability.   

Step 3: Enterprise Change Management Planning

Once key roles had been activated in NHSBSA, the next step was to understand how to and plan to build Enterprise Change Management capability. In April 2023, Andy and Helen attended a Prosci Enterprise Change Management Bootcamp. This 1-day workshop supports and develops attendees to build a case for Enterprise Change Management (ECM) and by utilising tools and models from the Prosci Methodology, assess their organisation’s change management maturity. As a result, Andy and Helen were able to initiate the development of a roadmap for NHSBSA’s Enterprise Change Management journey.  

Enterprise Change Management is an approach to change management that involves moving from the status of small-scale change management applied across individual projects, to a more coherent and  organisation-wide approach where it is embedded into every initiative and deployment. The first step in this process is to consider how change management is currently done in your organisation and to what level. The Prosci Change Management Maturity Model assesses the current level of adoption of change management in an organisation. Successfully building enterprise Change Management capability requires an intentional and concerted effort to build competencies and integrate best practices throughout the organisation. By doing so, NHSBSA will be capable of achieving their ambitious goals with the whole organisation singing from the same hymn sheet.  

The Future

Building Sponsor Capability

With an extremely successful roll out of role-based training across key departments in NHSBSA, what’s the next step in their journey?  

Now that the Project Teams are trained and certified in change management, and Andy and Helen are leading the Enterprise Change Management plans, the delivery teams are on the same page. However, for a change framework and approach to be truly embedded across the entire organisation, leadership must understand the value and process of change management.  

According to Prosci research, senior leaders play a crucial role in times of change because they are central to creating and embedding changes within an organisation. They are required to be visibly supporting the changes and to do that, leadership must clearly communicate the necessity and benefits of change management for their organisation. This is why Andy felt it was important to train their executive team in the importance of their role and give them an understanding of the change management frameworks the delivery team were using. In partnership with Prosci Europe, there are plans drawn up to send the leadership team on a Sponsor Briefing Workshop. This one-day programme provides leadership teams with clarification on the importance of their role in change by building a connection between effective change management and business results.  

Due to a management shakeup, a new Chief Portfolio Officer joined the organisation. In order to bring them up to speed, discussions are currently underway to consider next steps to bring the rest of the organisation up to speed with the ECM initiative and enable them to jump into planning and supporting building this capability within NHSBSA.  

“It is hugely important to have the trust and confidence in adopting a consistent change management approach.  We know that the Prosci approach offers us the ability to approach change from individual, project and enterprise levels – this scalability was crucial for supporting us in introducing change management as a capability.  It’s an exciting time for us to have the chance to bring these approaches in and support our large and complex change delivered across our business and the wider health family.” 

Helen Donaghy, Portfolio Delivery Lead at NHS Business Services Authority 

The Results

In the first twelve months, the NHSBSA now has 33 of their project delivery team certified as Prosci change management practitioners and 4 members of the team trained with the skillset to deliver internal one- day workshops for Managers and other staff. The first Taking Charge of Change workshop for 12 participants was held in May 2023 and more successful internal workshops have followed. Within six months, 10 sessions had been delivered covering over 120 NHSBSA colleagues.   This enabled the wider portfolio delivery community, and pilot project teams to be onboarded to the Prosci approach. 

This was a vital step in their change journey as this group are responsible for all the projects being delivered into the wider organisation. Consequently, NHSBSA has a growing number of projects and programmes using the Prosci Methodology and Framework with the Prosci® tools and techniques, enabling them to plan for the people side of change to support the delivery of their ambitious goals.  

Having successfully recruited for the first dedicated change management role, a Change Implementation Manager, support, advice and guidance can now be provided to project and programme delivery teams.  This role provides the vital expertise and support to the Prosci practitioner cohort to embed structured change management within their pilot projects.