How to build a digital team for your practice

Combining appropriately skilled, empowered, people into multi-disciplinary delivery teams is the single most important step you can take towards a successful digital transformation

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on NHS Providers

Trust boards face several ongoing challenges when it comes to delivering digital transformation, both externally and internally; these include finding sustainable funding, managing legacy systems, siloed working, managing risk, the visibility of traditional IT, recruitment and retention, and buy-versus-build tensions. 

Whilst these challenges can sometimes undermine efforts to build and run effective digital teams, they can also help your practice take an important step towards a successful digital transformation. To build a brilliant digital team for your practice, it is essential you fill the following roles:

• Product manager: product managers are leaders who care deeply about solving problems for users and achieving outcomes for the business. This vision needs to be combined with the right technical and design understanding to be able to determine at a high-level how this can be done.

• Delivery manager: this is a key role to ensure that the team has the right environment to successfully deliver. They remove blockers to delivery and use a variety of agile techniques and tools to ensure the team is happy and delivering value.

• Designer(s): there are several types of designer that are important to digital teams. An interaction designer focuses on providing clear and consistent user experience, and specialises in how users interact with digital products and services. A service designer is responsible for the end-to-end journey of a service and focuses on ensuring that a user can achieve their goal. A content designer is responsible for creating, reviewing and iterating the words used across services and digital products – content design is particularly important in health, where language and concepts can be difficult for people to understand.

• User researchers: they are responsible for helping the team understand users and their needs. They regularly test products with users, and ensure that the team understands how the feedback translates into changes to the digital product or service they are working on. It is important to actually observe users trying – and often failing – to use a digital product, because what users do is different to what they say. This concept isn’t new to the NHS, and is similar to the work done by trusts to understand patient journeys and staff shadowing.

• Lead developer: this person writes, adapts, maintains and supports the computer code underpinning your service. When there is more than one developer in the team this role is often then referred to as the ‘tech lead’ or ‘architect’.

• Lead clinician: this is particularly critical when the focus is on the delivery of good clinical outcomes and needs to be clinically-led. While it is not always the case that a digital team will be delivering a clinical service, clinicians are, nonetheless, always vital champions and stakeholders for any type of healthcare transformation. Your lead clinician should have an interest in technology and the basics of user-centred design.

Diversity 

As well as having a diverse skill set, it is important to ensure there is true diversity of thought and experience within a digital team. Establishing digital teams that reflect the diversity of the community you serve is critical as trusts grapple with the challenge of ensuring digital services are genuinely inclusive. 

Diverse teams are more likely to seek out a wider range of user experiences and viewpoints that have traditionally been overlooked, designing services and delivering outcomes that better meet user needs as a result. When recruiting digital teams, specifically, organisations will need to:

• Review recruitment practice: many organisations are already aware of the basics of diverse recruitment -make sure these are properly covered by doing things like checking job adverts for language that is biased towards particular genders to widen the pool of people applying for roles.

• Actively find new networks: several networks (such as the Shuri network, led by women of colour in digital health and care – including CIOs, CCIOs and aspiring leaders – or OneHealthTech, a volunteer group that promotes under-represented groups to become future health innovation leaders) are helping connect under-represented groups. They will be valuable sources of advice, guidance and potential team members.

• Speak to others: many parts of the NHS have learned from their own initiatives to improve diversity on what has worked (and not worked for them). Share ideas with your peers.