E-Book

www.totalmobile.co.uk

10 Practical Steps to Digital Workforce Management

Thank you for taking the time to read our eBook “10 Practical Steps to Digital Workforce Management”. We hope you find it interesting and informative. More importantly, we hope the hard-won expertise of our customers who co-authored this book, will help you shape a successful approach to your project.

The challenges and practical guidance described here have been tested and proven by real people from real organisations, who are just a little ahead of you in their Digital Workforce Management adventure - we’ll introduce them in the next section.

So why are we focusing here on the anatomy of a successful implementation? According to the Project Management Institute, the average IT project runs 45% over budget, 7% over time, and delivers 56% less value than expected. There have been numerous times we have seen this first hand, and had to restore faith in IT. Fortunately, with the help of our customers we did. We don’t only want you to have a successful implementation. We also want you to generate real, significant benefits, and continuous return on investment, post-implementation.

The report “Working anywhere: A winning formula for good work?” also predicted that flexible working will be the main way of working for 70 per cent of organisations by 2020, according to the research with 500 managerial level employees within medium to large businesses.The benefits of Digital Workforce Management are significant and long-lasting. As the report above suggests, it’s only a matter of time before this way of working will be the norm. Don’t be left behind. Start researching your Digital Workforce Management journey now. And there’s no better place to start than with this eBook.

Good luck!Jim DarraghCEO at Totalmobile

IntroductionsDuring the course of this eBook you will hear from…

Parker Moss, Chief Technology & Transformation Officer at Virgin Care

Sarah Royles, Service Development Manager at Nottinghamshire County Council

Graham Softley, Associate Director of IT at Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust

And you will hear real world examples from...

• Virgin Care• Fife Council• City of York Council• Nottinghamshire County Council• Clancy Docwra

And we even threw in a quote from Albert Einstein!

Digital Workforce Management is an approach, underpinned by technology, that helps you build a better, more effective working day for your teams in the field.

ContentsCustomer insight from Parker Moss, Virgin Care - “How seriously should we take the alleged ‘top three’ problems with mobile?” – Page 1

Step 1, Out with the old… Refine your requirements and clear inefficiencies – Page 3

Step 2, Be S.M.A.R.TDefine your objectives – Page 6

Step 3, Don’t let your solution hold you hostageDefine your requirements – Page 8

Customer insight from Sarah Royles, Nottinghamshire County Council – “The way to winning user hearts and minds when it comes to mobile: Support, support, support” – Page 10

Step 4, The greatest ideas are the simplestThe important of a good UI – Page 12

Step 5, Your staff are your secret weapon to successGet staff onside – Page 15

Step 6, Futureproof your investmentEnsure freedom of innovation – Page 17

Customer insight by Graham Softley, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust – “The key to staff acceptance of even the friendliest of technologies? Planning – not assuming they’ll ‘just love it’ as much as you do!” – Page 19

Step 7, Don’t DIYCollaborate with a third party – Page 21

Step 8, Do it once. And do it right!Be prepared to invest – Page 23

Step 9, Learn from the mistakes of others Learn from your peers – Page 25

Step 10, Celebrate good times (come on!)Celebrate success – Page 27

Conclusion – Page 29

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Customer Insight

“How seriously should we take the alleged ‘top three’ problems with mobile?”Mobility and connectivity has the power to deliver more efficient health and social care services. Virgin Care Chief Technology and Transformation Officer Parker Moss tells us how organisations like Virgin Care are at the forefront of using mobile technology to transform healthcare as we know it.

Mobile technology has the potential to make real transformative changes in the way health and social care gets delivered.

This is certainly one of the main reasons we have been exploring the potential of mobile-delivered apps and tablets which help our team members make better use of their working time. We see using technology to make better use of time, and spending as much of it as possible with patients is crucial to improve care delivery for our patients, and also to keep our services running efficiently.

One thing we need to address when we look at mobile in healthcare, like in other industries, are the fears and concerns that the teams who we’re asking to use the devices have. Based on the conversations I have had with people I think the top three concerns are the reliability of the technology, how intrusive it might be – either to home life or how it might intrude into the intimate relationship between a clinician and their patient, and how easy it is to use.

What about the Not Spots?

The reality is that we don’t live with perfect signal coverage everywhere, all the time. The infamous ‘not spot’ phenomenon is a reality, especially in the most rural areas where we provide services. Does that mean that mobile can’t really be trusted – that if the clinician can’t connect, the service could get compromised?

This is a real fear for our teams based on their experience of using a personal device when there’s no signal, but one that can be quickly overcome. With the system we use from Totalmobile, this is not an issue by design. If the connection drops, the software immediately spots it and moves to safe ‘offline mode’, quickly snapping back into fully connected mode when coverage returns and automatically synchronising any changes.

The solution’s ability to handle online and offline modes of working was a big part of our decision to go with Totalmobile as a partner and I think this will be an important point for many

Parker Moss, Chief Technology & Transformation OfficerVirgin Care

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readers of this blog, especially in areas where community nursing is an important part of care delivery, but signal quality may be sparse.

In our service in Devon where we are about to roll out Totalmobile, mobile network signal quality is poor in many of our residential patients homes. Being able to work either online or offline seamlessly is going to be a big factor in the success of this service.

Why do we think tablet typing is ‘worse’ than pen scribbling?

Some believe that mobile technology in the patient environment can be seen as alien and intrusive, but I have yet to witness this.

In practical care terms typing on a tablet is no different than writing on paper and does not have any impact at all on the nurse’s very warm, reassuring contact time with the patient but acknowledging the concerns is important and we’ve found ways of addressing them head-on.

For example, with our community nursing service in Surrey we’ve produced a welcome video which explains what the service offers, what will happen during the first session and – of course – an explanation of why the nurse has a tablet computer with them. This breaks down barriers, not least because the patient can hold the tablet while they watch the video.

The importance of good UI

Finally, in the past healthcare has not had a perfect record for systems put in front of practitioners because they have been complex and time-consuming, instead of intuitive for the user.

We recognise that any health IT system’s user interface has to be clinician- and specifically nurse-led and user-centric. That is very important, but still many get this wrong.

We have made this key in our deployment of technology. We have a senior nurse driving the actual design of the user interface for our platform and we have put time and effort into getting this absolutely right and the system looks like the kind of platform that a nurse would want to use and would relate to as a result.

Mobile technology will increasingly play a vital role in patient care and engagement but to reap the benefits we must get it right from the onset.

Parker Moss, Chief Technology & Transformation Officer at Virgin Care

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Chapter 1

Out with the old...Before embarking on your Digital Workforce Management journey, it is vital - and we mean vital - to honestly address your current processes, and think about how you can make them better. All organisations have inefficient processes. Fact. And most of these organisations would rather keep struggling to keep their heads above water and continue with these inefficient processes, than allow for new ideas to challenge the status quo. What made sense to your organisation 5 years, 1 year, even 6 months ago, might not work today. Taking time to improve and update these processes will help your staff to work more efficiently.

There are 4 indicators that your business processes are inefficient:

1) Lengthy manual processes.

This is probably the most common inefficiency across all organisations. A lot of time is spent manually completing work, which is often replicating the work that has been done by someone else. Ok – it is not always possible to eradicate all manual processes, however there are opportunities for vast improvement. Identify the most time-consuming or costly manual processes and think about introducing ways to automate them, in order to free up (a lot of) time and minimise the risk of replication and errors. There is a vast array of technologies available today that automate processes. Choose the best approach for your organisation.

2) Mistakes.

Of course, mistakes happen. We’re only human. But if the same mistakes are happening over and over again, it might not be down to an individual, but actually due to out-of-date processes. What’s worse, with poor processes, you often don’t get the opportunity to realise that a mistake has been made until it is too late to do anything about it. If this is the case, you need to rethink these processes. Mistakes only cost time (and often money) in the long run, so ensure your processes allow you to get things done right first time. This in itself can provide heaps of efficiencies.

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3) Struggling to find information.

If your staff struggle to find the information they need quickly, you have a major issue. They spend valuable time trawling through systems to find the information they need, and who’s to know whether it is the most up-to-date information? It could be the first piece of semi-relevant information they find. Most of the time there is not one version of “factual” information available to staff. There’s most likely snippets of relevant information scattered all over the place. By simply making the latest information readily available to staff, your organisation will save a lot of time. The most successful businesses tend to be those that have the ability to access information when they need it. This could be information that enables staff to complete a job, or information that enables them to analyse and report on performance and predict future trends.

4) Overly complex processes.

If processes are difficult to understand and time-consuming to follow, you have a problem. This inevitably leads to non-adoption, as staff will naturally look for alternative, easier ways to complete their job. With staff making up their own processes, errors and inconsistencies are certain. A great way to measure this is when someone new joins your team. Ask them for an honest assessment of the way in which you operate. If they find it difficult to understand, the likelihood is that they should be improved.Addressing any one of the issues listed above will have a measurable impact on your organisation – tackling them all could be transformational!

Real world example – Virgin Care

Community nurses used to visit patients in their homes, complete manual paperwork, and drive back to the office to rekey this information into their works system. By simply automating this process, Virgin Care are saving 2 hours, per nurse, per day, which can be spent visiting more patients.

Actually, there is one more indicator. One that happens in almost every large organisation, and that people tend to not even think of as a problem.

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Real World Example

5) Lack of decision making.

Many large organisations take months or even years to get anything done; even where advantages such as cost savings, productivity improvements, or winning new business are obvious. A large number of people are involved, but none take it to a decision-making level. Instead, they agree that it is a good idea, but “pass the buck” to someone else to make a decision. Endless meetings around decision making wastes time and resource. Of course the key people within your organisation need to be involved in any restructuring of processes; but ensure that at least one of them has the power to make a decision fairly quickly, or else this is just adding to the inefficiency issue within your organisation. Determine who the ultimate decision maker needs to be. Gather the relevant information they need to make the decision, whether it’s RoI, productivity gains, or something else, and present it to them. Achieve sign off and then go do it!

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Chapter 2

Be S.M.A.R.T.Without trying to “teach a granny to suck eggs”, business objectives are very important – in fact, they are necessary. Objectives provide direction and a sense of purpose for a business. They help a company direct all workers towards the same ultimate aims or goals. It’s also highly beneficial not only to come up with objectives, but to document them and communicate them to staff. Without clear objectives, a business is likely to have inefficient processes (think back to step 1). It is difficult for staff to perform productive tasks without a clear sense of the purpose of their actions.

We’re sure that you have heard of this model before, but objectives need to be S.M.A.R.T.

• Specific• Measureable• Achievable• Relevant• Timely

The reason S.M.A.R.T has remained such a popular system over the years is simple: it’s complete and it works!’

To give you another head start - there’s already a well-established set of high-level objectives that most organisations adopt and pursue profitably:

• Productivity• Customer service• Employee retention• Growth• Increase market share• Innovation• Modernisation• Improve the quality of service• Brand recognition• Achieving business globalisation

But these are unhelpful if they are unspecific, unachievable, irrelevant or cannot be measured!.

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You need to ask yourself some questions;

• What exactly do you want to achieve?• How will you achieve it?• When will you achieve it?• What are the conditions and limitations?• Why do you want to achieve it?

An example of a S.M.A.R.T objective is increasing your staff’s productivity by 15% by the end of 2017, with Digital Workforce Management. This is achievable, relevant, and has a deadline. You can also measure it in a variety of ways, an example being to determine the amount of jobs completed in a week, pre and post mobile working, and comparing them.

You have the opportunity to generate some great information and statistics about your organisation that can help you keep striving towards your ultimate goals. Make sure you implement a solution that can capture them.

By capturing this information, you can measure the effectiveness of your solution. This is usually the part that people don’t put enough thought into. By neglecting the methodology to measure this, people are evaluating objectives based on their perception of success, which doesn’t compare to being able to present clear metrics that represent performance, both prior and post project.

You should either ensure you have easy access to the information you require, or perhaps look to work with a 3rd party or any chosen supplier to help you accumulate these metrics. They will ultimately be what determines whether you have achieved success or not. Your objectives are the stepping stones which guide you to achieving your goals. It is important to think about them from the outset, and more important to get them right.

Real world example – Fife Council

One of the council’s objectives was to save £100 million in 5 years. By implementing a Digital Workforce Management solution that best fitted their needs, they saved over £20 million of this target in a few short years. Not only are they generating huge cost savings, but they are also benefitting in other ways;

“We’re providing a more effective and efficient service for the customer. Our employees are able to work more flexibly with regards to their work life balance. We’re also delivering on the productivity benefits of the Council.” – Jill Pritchard, Business Change Manager, Fife Council.

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Chapter 3

Don’t let your solution hold you hostage.Don’t be afraid to clearly define your requirements at the beginning, no matter how ambitious they may seem. You know your organisation the best, and the outcomes that are expected. Some more requirements may come out further down the process, but if you have a few definite ones in mind from the start, then you’re more than likely to choose the best approach to Digital Workforce Management.

For example, one requirement that has significant impact yet is rarely fully explored by organisations until after they’ve deployed a solution, is connectivity. The reality is that we don’t live with perfect signal coverage everywhere, all the time. The infamous ‘not spot’ phenomenon is a reality, especially in the most rural areas where services are provided. But that doesn’t mean that mobile can’t be trusted. Yes, some solutions claim they offer offline working, but delving deeper into this, it becomes apparent that functionality “falls over” frequently. We recommend you take the time to fully explore what each supplier means by offline and what users of a solution can and cannot do when they are in those inevitable areas of poor or no signal. Some solutions on the market do offer true offline working, so your staff can get the job done, no compromise.

Parker Moss, Chief Technology & Transformation Officer at Virgin Care, ensured this was a requirement from the offset. Where Virgin Care’s nurses deliver services in Devon, the mobile network signal quality is poor in many areas, but they can still deliver an excellent standard of care to patients, with or without connectivity.

Real world example

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Another example; device agnosticism, which refers to anything that is designed to be compatible across most common systems or platforms. Your organisation may currently have Samsung smartphones rolled out to all staff, but what if you wish to change to iPads in 2 years? Will the solution you’ve chosen still work? Or maybe smartphones better suit one department, but tablets suit another department. You should make sure that your solution is compatible with most operating systems and can work on different types of devices.

Furthermore, you may wish to roll this solution out to hundreds of staff, or multiple departments, or both. Or roll it out to 100 staff now, but increase this to 1000 in a year’s time. It is important to determine what solutions still perform with this number of users, and which will struggle.

The key thing here is to make sure you dictate the requirements of the solution, and not the other way around. Countless times organisations don’t advance with solutions because they are unnecessarily restricting what they can and cannot do. Money and resource is wasted on these types of solutions, because they don’t work for staff or the organisation, and as a result don’t generate cost or efficiency savings. It’s a typical case of “one step forward, two steps back”.

Think about the outcomes that you need from this solution and work backwards to determine your requirements. Document them, and ensure the solution you are considering can meet them.

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Customer Insight

“The way to winning user hearts and minds when it comes to mobile: Support, support, support” By the end of 2015, we put a mobile device in the hands of everyone in the council who needs one. Today, I want to say a little about why we think this is going to be a really powerful enabler for the staff involved.

The deployment – a key part of our push here to change the way we deliver ICT right across the board – has one over-arching philosophy that I think is critical in terms of understanding our thinking here: it’s about really helping staff do what they do much better – as well as cutting out as much inefficiency in all our processes as we possibly can.

I do also immediately have to say – and I’m sure many of you reading this will have some insight into this – that you can’t just say that you’re going to introduce a new way of working, even for the very best aims, without expecting a reservation or two by staff.

Let’s be frank; introducing new things can be scary. And some teams, as in our initial case, the social care team, were slightly hesitant about how this was going to make them more efficient. But that was genuinely our push here. We wanted to help our people to be as enabled as we could make them in terms of delivering a good service. Yes, we wanted to save funds; we’re operating in the same austerity environment as most people in local government. But we were convinced we could transform worker lives by use of technology and meet the financial goal at the same time by doing things differently.

Extending the system off their own bat

Quite rightly, you’re going to ask if it has worked. I can genuinely tell you things are definitely looking very positive. With an initial rollout of some 500 tablets and the Totalmobile mobile software on top, we are all slowly, but steadily, finding out just how much more we can achieve using these tools.

We were careful about how we got the devices out there. We had a very well worked-out implementation plan centred on a lot of communications and training for staff. This involved face-to-face briefings with on-going online help and resources plus a lot of mentoring from bothTotalmobile people plus peers within the teams, who are doing some great work getting their colleagues up to speed with this new technology.

Sarah Royles, Service Development ManagerNottinghamshire County Council

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To be honest, we’re surprised not just at how well this is going, but also who has taken to the new practices. There have been some people racing ahead here who would have been the last ones I’d have predicted would have grasped mobile technology and ran with it. That’s been very gratifying to see.

Not just gratifying, it’s been illuminating, too. Off their own bat, some staff have worked out how to extend the system’s functionality, in really interesting ways, too, by incorporating photography as part of service user visits.

So, if staff acceptance is going well, what else can we say is a measure of mobile’s positive impact here at Nottinghamshire?

We’ve not done any kind of an exhaustive audit just yet, as the project is still on-going. But what we are already hearing is a lot of talk about how much not having to write up so many notes at the end of the day is seen as a plus-point, which is great, as we really wanted that to be a deliverable for the team.

This is a soft benefit as we hadn’t previously been tracking how much time was spent by people in the evening doing admin catch-up.

Don’t impose. But do hand-hold!

Can we share any pointers for best practice at this juncture, then?

I think we’d want to emphasise how important it is to communicate. You want to take your people along on the journey here. I’d also really work on listening to staff when you ask them what could be improved about their jobs; IT is really just an enabler for doing that – you won’t succeed if you just impose something ‘from above’ that they don’t see as aiding them along in their daily work schedule.

But above all, keep being supportive. We are definitely moving to getting all of our people to be able to deliver a much more professional service to the community, empowered by information at their fingertips – but we don’t expect them to do it all on their own.

And if you want to succeed in your mobile project, I recommend you don’t either.

Sarah Royles, Service Development Manager at Nottinghamhsire County Council

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Chapter 4

The greatest ideas are the simplest - William GoldingOver 40 million people in the UK use a smartphone. That is a HUGE number! It is two thirds of the UK population (Ofcom, 2015).

When people are expected to use systems on mobile devices for work, they expect, at the very least, for it to be familiar and easy to use.

Sadly, most of the time, this is not the case. Many enterprise software providers still don’t give the User Interface (UI) the attention it needs and deserves, but instead get bogged down in the functionality. Many providers simply mobilise their current back office systems, failing to take into account what it’s actually like to work in the field. They think that by allowing staff to access the back office system on a mobile device, this constitutes as mobile working. The result? An app for each back office system – and not one of them designed to work the way a mobile worker does. As long as the solution ticks a few functionality boxes such as ‘access information’ and ‘record information’ this will suffice. They couldn’t be more wrong. No thought is given to the usability of the solution or how easy it is to utilise in the actual work environment.

This was the case in the City of York Council. They implemented a mobile working solution, and staff adoption was non-existent. Staff were struggling with an underperforming solution, and as a result, they were left with a poor reputation of mobile working and IT. On the plus side, when City of York came to look at mobile working again, they knew exactly what they wanted, and knew their focus needed to be on the end user.

Real world example

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So what makes a good UI?• It’s simple – don’t over complicate things, or bombard the user with tonnes

of information if it’s not relevant to the job they are doing. This only wastes time and frustrates staff even more. Ensure there is sheer clarity. And ensure relevant things such as work schedule, job information, and supporting documents are easily and quickly accessible. This isn’t too much to ask, right? (You’d be surprised!) As Albert Einstein stated “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”. This is definitely the case when it comes to UI.

• It’s familiar – this is the whole idea of it being ‘intuitive’. But what does intuitive actually mean? It means that if you put a system in the hands of your staff, they naturally and instinctively know what to do. When you’re familiar with something, you know how it behaves and what to expect. Back to the stat at the top of the page – imagine giving your staff a solution that is as easy to use as the various apps they use at home? How satisfied would they be! Adoption would be instantaneous, and minimal time will be spent training. They can get right on with the job at hand. Of course, this is not the case with most providers. But some solutions are made to fit the needs of the worker, and not the needs of the back office systems.

• It’s consistent – consistent systems allow the user to develop usage patterns. They will learn what different buttons and icons mean, and if the same are used throughout the system, they recognise them quicker as time goes on.

• It’s responsive – responsive can mean two things. The first is ‘fast’. How quickly does it load? How quickly can I find and access the information I need? How quickly does it sync to the back office system? These are all very important. But responsiveness can mean something else. Does it provide some sort of feedback? Does it confirm that the form has been submitted? Even when the device is offline? That the signature has been captured? That you have logged out securely? Can it prepopulate information that has been submitted before – making for a better user experience and a more efficient service? These will provide the user with a sense of confidence that what they are doing is actually working. Factors like these are equally as important.

• It’s maintainable – (or flexible). Let’s go back to the City of York Council as an example. They wish to purchase a solution that will fit their organisational needs. That is, the needs for multiple departments. But the information captured in a Repairs and Maintenance visit, will be vastly different from the information captured in a Social Care visit. This is commonplace in a lot of organisations. So will the solution you choose allow you to make minor modifications and adjustments to forms and document libraries, without affecting the overall look or performance? The last thing you want to do is have a range of different technologies that require support, or to have to invest a large amount of resource to make changes in order to make the solution relevant to another group of people. It’s worthwhile to think about.

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• It’s forgiving – we all make mistakes – as said before, we’re only human! But ensure you choose a solution that handles these mistakes well. For example, someone deletes a document. By accident. Can they retrieve it again with no hassle? Or someone enters incorrect information into a form and submits it – can they edit this easily? A solution that scares staff, or punishes them for their mistakes is not a friendly one.

User adoption is key to success. And the best way to ensure this is by providing technology that is easy for them to use. And that the technology actually makes their jobs easier and aids the way in which they work. If you don’t, the solution will fail. It’s as simple (and frustrating) as that.

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Chapter 5

Your staff are your secret weapon to success.A major mistake organisations tend to make when implementing any sort of change to their business, is not involving staff from the outset.

It really does pay dividends to involve your staff from the very beginning, and lay out the vision. Clearly state what is changing and why. Show staff where you are today, and where you intend to be in the future. Make sure you show them why this matters to the organisation and how it will benefit their working lives. Communicate to them that it will free up time, enhance flexibility, and allow for lone worker safety. Ensure that staff feel like this isn’t just something that will make them work even harder and benefit the company. They need to feel that they will benefit from it as well.

Also, ask their advice. Give them the opportunity to have their say and get an insight into what they believe their needs are. Allow them to highlight what frustrates them, what is complicated, and what takes up a lot of their time. This will also help you with step 1 (clearing out the inefficient processes). No one knows better than your staff about what processes are and are not working. Utilise them.

By the end of 2015, Nottinghamshire County Council had put a mobile device in the hands of their social workers. Sarah Royles, Service Development Manager, says the way to win the hearts of users when it comes to mobile is support. Their main driver for mobile working was really helping staff do what they do, but much better. If they nailed this, then inefficiencies would inevitably be cut down. Sarah says you can’t just introduce a new way of working, without expecting a reservation or two by staff. Initially the social care team were hesitant about how this was going to make them more efficient. But by communicating with them early in the process why this was going to make their lives easier, they were fully on board. In fact, Sarah was surprised how well it went and who has taken to the new practice. Some staff were racing ahead, off their own bat, working out how to extend the system’s functionality in really innovative ways. Nottinghamshire County Council have went on to generate 17% productivity savings and £600 per annum per employee in travel savings, as well as significant savings in other aspects, such as agency staff. Sarah is confident the reason this project was successful was because they had staff bought in from the beginning.

Real world example– Nottinghamshire County Council

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Staff who are fully informed, and have been involved in the decision making process are more than likely to embrace the change. If you put a new solution in their hands that they aren’t familiar with, they won’t use it. Mostly due to the fear of change and a lack in confidence in its ability to enable them to do their job better. They’ll resort back to old ways of working.

You want to take your staff along with you on this journey. And furthermore, you need to keep being supportive, even after the solution is implemented. You can’t expect staff to do it all on their own. A good idea is to encourage some of your staff to be “super users”. Frontline workers who use the solution and love it, who can act as ambassadors to fellow staff. Super users can empower staff, facilitate adoption and provide a feedback loop of frontline voices.

We truly believe that if you take care of your employees, they will take care of your business.

Let’s finish off with some excellent advice from Sarah:

“If you just impose something ‘from above’ that they don’t see as aiding them along in their daily work, you will not succeed”.

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Chapter 6

Futureproof your investment.Implementing Digital Workforce Management is an opportunity to drive real innovation, which will transform service delivery, not only for the short-term, but for long-term too. Don’t fall into the trap of implementing a solution that works great for a couple of years, but as soon as a big change occurs, a messy and expensive replacement follows. Fractured IT systems impact severely on profitability and service delivery. For growing organisations with complex processes or deliverables, planning ahead isn’t easy. But by anticipating the future and developing methods of minimising the effects of future pressures and any nasty surprises, your organisation can continue to prosper.

There are 3 things that you can do to help futureproof your investment:

• Transform togetherCross-department coordination is one of the biggest barriers to transformation. Technology will never be effectively implemented in silos. Everyone has good ideas about how to innovate. True leaders understand that a strong company culture helps surface these ideas and spur innovation. Just because a process or solution has been around for decades doesn’t mean it’s right today. Ask your staff (and your customers) what they like and don’t like about the operations. As mentioned in the previous step, listen to each department, devise a strategy that works for everyone, and then decide on the necessary solution.

• Accept that change will happenTechnologies will change, and requirements will change. Your solutions will need to be adaptable to keep up. The only thing you can do is design your solutions to be flexible, or work with an experienced supplier who is constantly updating their solutions. So as things change, you can change some elements of your solution without having to replace the entire thing.

• Build/purchase an open solutionWhen it comes to building software, or purchasing a software solution, it’s important to choose technology that is flexible and doesn’t back you into a tight corner. Make sure the solution can integrate with other existing solutions, as well as those that may emerge in the future. Don’t be a hostage to suppliers who are unwilling to assist you in your innovative approach. Make sure you work with a supplier that is continually innovating themselves.

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Make sure that your potential for innovation isn’t restricted by old technologies or outdated processes. In this fast moving market, there will always be opportunity for continual innovation. It’s vital to think about the future when choosing a solution. Whatever solution you choose will not be relevant for you forever, but it should be adaptable and easily augmented to suit your future needs. Your technology should always be able to evolve along with your company, your customers, and their needs.

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Customer Insight

“The key to staff acceptance of even the friendliest of technologies? Planning – not assuming they’ll ‘just love it’ as much as you do!” If I have any specific advice to other organisations thinking about empowering staff with devices and mobile applications, it’s this:

Think through all your issues first – don’t just assume there are not really any questions to ask here, as ‘we’re all using smartphones now’.

I think that’s what helped us here in terms of getting our mobility project right. Let me explain. Yes, in many ways now is the right time to look at mobility; costs have come right down, driven by the amazing take-up of tablets etc in the consumer space. From a purely technical perspective, they are also a lot less clunky than they used to be, much easier to encrypt (so important patient data is properly protected), the battery power has come on an amazingly long way, and they are much better now at doing useful things when offline – which certainly wasn’t the case even just a couple of years ago. So, the usability factor is really high for mobile technology now, as is the size and lightness, there are many positive reasons to go this way for sure.

But you just can’t assume that’s a shoo-in for changing people’s working practices – which is really what you are doing when you take a step like this. Yes, for some individuals, they may well have their own technology at home that makes what they use at work seem a bit primitive, but that’s never going to be the majority – and you just can’t assume that everyone is au fait with technology either, even in today’s technological world.

Take our own story as an example. We’ve deployed iPads running Totalmobile’s software to some 400 field staff; we won financial backing from the Nursing Technology Fund to do this. We carefully staggered the roll out, to one team of about 60 staff at a time, and it worked out quite well. But none of these clinicians had been using anything like this level of technology previously; this is quite a different way of working for our users, which are adult community nurses in our healthcare team going out to see patients in their homes on a daily basis.

What we wanted to achieve with this technology is continuity of care. These team members needed to be as effective and helpful as they can be for every minute they are in the patient’s home. We wanted them to have everything they need to know about the patient they are with at their fingertips, hence the iPads.

Graham Softley, Associate Director of IT Strategy and DeliveryBuckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust

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Never assume; always plan properly

And, I am delighted to say, it’s happening – right here, right now – and starting to bed down very well. But, we had a very carefully thought out plan to roll this out and we structured our internal communication and training plan to support it – it would have been far too risky to just put the tablets in people’s hands without some transition hand-holding.

The emphasis from day one was on usability and usefulness. We knew that if we failed to hit either target, then this just wouldn’t stick. What’s been great is that we’ve seen some staff take to this like the proverbial ducks to water, including people I would never have predicted would be so comfortable with technology, so quickly. But we could not assume that would be the case. We had to plan to get this right, which is what I mean by my warning that you can never just push technology out, even apparently no-brainer things like tablets; the technology has to be seen as contributing to better working days for the users, or there just won’t be any buy-in.

So, to repeat, that’s my advice if you are looking at this route of travel too for your health and social care organisation. Don’t assume; think through what could go wrong – and plan for a supportive and responsive way of deploying it.

I am sure that will give you what we’re seeing here – real acceptance and change at the front line of delivery of vital public services.

Graham Softley, Associate Director of IT Strategy and Delivery at Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust.

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Chapter 7

Don’t DIYOk, maybe just saying “don’t DIY” is a bit brash. It’s easy to understand why some organisations choose to research building a solution themselves – even if they don’t eventually go ahead. Concerns over their unique requirements or being ‘locked-in’ to a specific vendor often arise. However, effective Digital Workforce Management is not easy, with many aspects that need to be considered. Do listen to our advice on why you should consider collaborating with an experienced, mobile-first supplier;

1. Expertise – with a Digital Workforce Management vendor, every single member of their staff is working on the solution, with no other product or service distracting them or taking away from their time. This means they accumulate expertise. They can bring the experience of other organisations to yours. They only profit if they offer a competitive product. More than likely they will also have built up a methodology for delivering projects that’s been battle-tested. The list goes on.

2. Resource – they have the manpower and the budget to, not only develop the solution, but to maintain it and continually innovate as well. Your internal team could spend a lot of time developing something, and by the time it’s finished, it is already out of date. Suppliers whose focus is on Digital Workforce Management, continuously improve, update, and innovate their systems.

3. Scalability – suppliers know how to develop a solution that is built to scale. But look out, some solutions struggle to perform once they hit over 100 users. Some solutions also don’t work on multi platforms or devices. But with experienced, mobile-first suppliers, this isn’t an issue. Remember, ask the hard questions upfront!

4. Dedicated support – suppliers have a dedicated support team to help with any issues, or fix any bugs or glitches that might occur. If you have developed your own solution, issues and glitches take up a lot of your internal resource, distracting them from their job at hand.

5. Integration – with the amount of back office systems your organisation potentially has, integration is a very complex process, and can take a lot of time. It is very likely that you don’t have the skillsets within your organisation to integrate seamlessly with your back office system, and you would have to pay extortionate money for a third party to come in and solely perform integration. Trusted suppliers who develop Digital Workforce Management also perform the integration process, and more than likely have integrated with most, if not all, of your back office providers before.

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The City of York Council previously tried mobile working, but ended up implementing an underperforming solution that wasn’t fit for purpose. There were issues with connectivity and a poor user interface. From this though, they learnt a lot, and when it came to looking at mobile working again, they knew exactly what they wanted and they knew that their focus needed to be on the end user. Since adopting their new Digital Workforce Management solution, they are already experiencing high productivity and cost savings, and look forward to rolling it out across the entire council.

Real world example – City of York Council

Work with people who understand and have a focus on Digital Workforce Management. After all, they have done it all before. Your knowledge of your own processes, combined with the right, experienced provider’s knowledge is the perfect combination.

Collaboration is key.

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Chapter 8

Do it once. And do it right!We previously said that doing Digital Workforce Management right, isn’t easy. Many organisations significantly underestimate the amount of time and resources they’ll need to give to the project. Having the required skillsets can be a blind spot too: both in terms of understanding specific technologies, but also the ability to think about how people use mobile systems vs more traditional platforms.

Enterprise mobility is very different to other traditional enterprise platforms, and often, organisations approach these diverse projects in the same way. Which isn’t the way to go about it. Enterprise mobility is unique. Therefore it needs a unique approach. Five things to seriously consider with enterprise mobility are:

• New technologies and platforms that require new skillsets and the time to learn them, not to mention the dedicated support for these technologies.

• The time and skills needed to understand the unique systems and data requirements of mobile working in general.

• The time needed to properly understand how your organisation’s field workers in particular, really do their work. After all, your solution needs to be designed to work the way your people work.

• The complexities of procuring, deploying and managing multiple mobile platforms – especially relevant to organisations where different kinds of roles require different device types.

• Neglecting to include the effort needed for effective back office integration.

The term, “do it right, do it once” comes to mind here. Instead of “do it wrong, do it many!”

The cost of failure is enormous. There have been so many occasions where an organisation has implemented a poor solution, and a year or so down the line, it is rendered unfit for purpose. All that investment wasted – with even more investment needed to procure a suitable solution. But it’s more than this. You have lost out on considerable “man hours”, and a significant amount of time where you could have been benefitting from a quality solution that meets your needs and is providing you with return on investment.

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Not to mention the loss of confidence from the frontline to any future IT efforts; something which can be detrimental. You also probably have to go out to tender for a new solution, since you’ve realised that the value can be delivered from elsewhere. Which can take a lot of time. This cost of failure is significantly greater than the savings you had originally tried to make, by investing in the wrong solution first time around.

Clancy Docwra had implemented mobile working twice before, both times being in-house. But the driver for looking for a third solution, and collaborating with a supplier, was the type of work they do. Their gangs travel up and down the country performing jobs, often in areas of no connectivity. Since adopting their third version of mobile, they have experienced numerous benefits and are on target to achieve 100% safety record goal, with their “work safe = home safe” mission.

Real world example – Clancy Docwra

Adopting a Digital Workforce Management solution is not a quick and simple process. Think of the amount of systems it needs to integrate into; the amount of staff you have; the amount of information they need access to on a daily basis; and analysing the best processes that will deliver the best results. It needs a lot of time and effort at the beginning, in order for it to get up and running. But once you start realising the benefits generated, it will all be more than worth it. Productivity gains. Mega cost savings. Boost in staff morale. Higher quality of service delivered. Happy customers. Winning more business. Staying competitive. Predicting future trends. These are only some of the benefits you will gain with a good quality solution.

By not being prepared to make the required investment, you are running the massive risk of a failed project, wasted resource, and more than likely, the need to do it all over again! Think of the headaches that will cause throughout the organisation!

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Chapter 9

Learn from the mistakes of othersWe hope that at least some of what you’ve read up to this point has sparked some new thinking – and perhaps a flash of painful recognition or two. We’ve had the fortunate (or perhaps unfortunate depending on how you want to look at it) opportunity of reigniting people’s beliefs and confidence in Digital Workforce Management. All too often a bad experience with a supplier ends in project failure and innovation stagnates for a while. And this only leaves that organisation at the back of the pack, with competition accelerating ahead.

So, if you’re part of one of these organisations who have a failed mobile project under your belt, don’t give up. Ask the experts!

If you have never implemented any form of Digital Workforce Management before, and feel a bit overwhelmed about it, never fear. Ask the experts!

And when we say ‘experts’, we don’t mean suppliers, some of which will only tell you what they think you want to hear. We mean your peers. People in other organisations who have successfully implemented Digital Workforce Management, especially after a failed project, and will be brutally honest with you. Speaking to your peers is a chance to collect ideas and insights. We’ve all heard of the sayings that two heads are better than one and that a problem shared is a problem halved.

Wired carried out a study that proved that we learn more from others’ mistakes. Albeit, the test was a bit “cooler”, in that it was monitoring opponents while playing a video game, but we still think it applies to everyone in everyday life.

You’ve already heard advice from some of these people throughout the course of this eBook; Sarah Royles, Graham Softley, and Parker Moss.

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But anyone who is involved in these type of projects should be more than happy to speak to you about their journey, their challenges along the way, and how they overcame them. Ask them things like;

“What are the main drivers for mobile working?”

“What challenges did you have to overcome?”

“What would you do differently?”

“What did you do right?”

“What are the gaps filled by the new solution?”

“What benefits are you gaining now?”

You’d be pleasantly surprised to learn that almost every organisation has had to overcome some hurdles. Digital Workforce Management is not something to be underestimated. But if you follow the steps outlined here, and seek advice from real people who have done it all before, it definitely makes for a much smoother process. And don’t worry if you make a mistake or two along the way. It happens. What’s important is that you recognise when something isn’t working properly, and you work effectively to make it right.

As Jim Rohn once said “It’s important to learn from your mistakes, but it is better to learn from other people’s mistakes…”

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Chapter 10

Celebrate good times (come on)So you’ve implemented your Digital Workforce Management solution. And it’s a raving success! You’ll soon realise benefits and insights that will allow your organisation to continually improve and grow.

What should you do next?

Celebrate success!

Firstly, celebrate with your colleagues for a job well done. A lot of blood, sweat and tears (well hopefully no blood and not too many tears!!) have gone into making this project a successful reality. Celebrations don’t need to be costly or flash. They can be anything from a little get-together in the breakroom, or meal out after work. Thank your team for their hard work during the project, to reinforce their initiative and to inspire them to continue to deliver great service in the future. It’s ultimately about motivation. It also boosts morale. You enable staff to appreciate that they have achieved something great and of meaning. That they’re undertaking a better job and customers are receiving a better service because of their hard work. This will lead your staff to look more favourably towards future projects with a confidence that they can continue to improve, and achieve great things. A timely celebration can also help drive uptake of the solution with your target users.

Secondly, celebrate the organisation’s success with the project. Not only celebrating the successful implementation, but celebrate your newfound benefits as well. Too many organisations these days are shy about highlighting their successes, probably in fear of competitors finding out about them.

But your success is your differentiator! It’s what makes you stand out from the competitive crowd, and win more business. It shows potential customers that you run an efficient, and high quality service, with skilled and experienced staff. Be proud of your team and what you have achieved. Be proud of your organisation and the new way in which it works.

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Celebrating success also positions your organisation as one that is innovative and forward-thinking. An organisation who is looking to improve, and an organisation that suddenly looks a lot more attractive to work with, and for.

Now to provide you with Jim Rohn’s quote in its entirety;

“It’s important to learn from your mistakes, but it is BETTER to learn from other people’s mistakes…and it is BEST to learn from other people’s successes. It accelerates your own success”.So learn from other people’s successes, and accelerate your own. Shout it from the rooftops. Be proud and enjoy working for your more efficient, cost-effective, happier staffed, even BETTER organisation!

Since implementing a successful Digital Workforce Management solution, Clancy Docwra are completing more jobs every day, and are providing their clients with excellent quality data, which gives them a competitive edge. With their new solution, they can go on to win even more business, now and in the future.

Real world example – Clancy Docwra

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Conclusion

So there you have it. Our 10 Practical Steps to Digital Workforce Management. We hope you found this eBook insightful, and have learned from our contributors. We especially hope it has reinforced your confidence in Digital Workforce Management and that you feel more comfortable embarking on your adventure.

Embracing the expert guidance given by our customers and organising your thinking around the 10 steps we outlined, will go a long way to ensuring your project is a lasting success.

If you think we have missed something, or you have a great story to share, please contact us at info@totalmobile.co.uk – we’ll be sure to highlight it to our readers.

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