Jan 8
Ode to Ian Roddis
This is the text of the tribute to Ian I gave at the UHN Digital Town Hall in December 2021 ahead of Ian leaving in January 2022.
As many of you know, Ian will leave us at the start of January. We don’t have another moment when we’re all together, so I just wanted to use this opportunity to pay tribute to him and the contribution that he’s made to the organisation.
I knew Ian back in the day when we both worked at NHS Digital, but we only used to bump into each other infrequently in the office in London. I knew three key things about him:
- That I somehow had the responsibility of signing off his expense so challenged him driving from Milton Keynes to Leeds on a regular basis
- His impressive floppy fringe
- and the way he managed to persuade me to release some money out of my budget for the Service Manual.
So it was a pleasant surprise to see Ian’s application for Deputy CDIO back at the end of 2019, and I don’t know if you felt the amount of effort I put into courting you on the open day Ian, but I was thinking I want that bloke in our organisation!
So fortunately, we managed to secure him and Ian joined KGH on 2nd March 2020, and then 2 weeks later, the world changed dramatically. Many of you were part of the effort — but it’s easy to forget what things were like back then. Once he’d landed, Ian was instrumental at getting things up and running — and introduced agile methods immediately, so we used a Kanban board to track all the various things in train and set up the daily standup. KGH was one of the first Trusts in England to start using Teams.
So Ian made a massive impact during then, but what else has he done?
- Looked after c.£1m funding to migrate KGH to the cloud
- Managed innovative projects — working with Madetech to implement virtual visiting, progressing the bed Tetris work we’ve heard about previously on these sessions, experimenting with machine learning in clinical coding.
- Been great at helping us re-prioritise continually based on delivering the most value to staff and patients
He’s also got a great track record on getting business cases through — can’t remember the total, but something you should be proud of Ian is the way you’re able to communicate the need in a way that is understandable by all to get behind it.
So that’s the technical side of things, but main thing is the human side. He’s a great human being. I know many of you have benefited from his support and encouragement and let’s face it, his Dad jokes…. He truly has the needs of people at the heart of what he does and I’ve welcomed the feedback and advice he’s given to me along the way. Ian has such a nice way of jollying us all along, whilst remaining absolutely focused on delivery and the track record that we’ve mentioned speaks volumes of how that works.
I know a lot of people have talked about how much impact you’ve had on them Ian, how they’ve felt they’ve grown professionally and personally with your support. And what better tribute can a person have than to know that you’ve impacted people on a personal and emotional level. You’ve impacted on me Ian and I thank you sincerely for that. I hope you’ll join me in wishing Ian all the best in his new venture at Bucks.
