Weeknotes s02e18
TL;DR: More Demand and Capacity Modelling. Retros everywhere!
[week ending 15/05/2020]
Who did you talk to outside of your organisation? I joined a number of system calls regarding demand and capacity modelling. There’s plenty of potential to make this model something that is useful in normal times not just part of covid planning. The model takes into account a number of factor that I mentioned last week. This week we’ve been doing some more work on the number of beds we ought to remove to increase social distancing. In this instance, COVID-19 has a much bigger impact on capacity rather than demand. As our hospital has buildings from every era, the specifications they were built with also differ. Take bed spacing for example, the change between 1994 and 2013 extended the recommended spacing by nearly a metre.
Changing the spacing also has a knock-on effect on staffing. Some wards would still need around the same level of staff even if some beds were removed, due to the architecture of the building not lending itself to patient visibility.
I talked to Microsoft about their support offering models. We’ve got a lot of work to do with moving to Office 365, implementing Power BI and so I’m keen to explore what kind of support we may need to do a great implementation.
I also gave a reference for someone who worked for me as a contractor earlier this year. Although the person from the agency asking for the reference could of done this via email, they insisted to have a phone call, obviously so they could achieve twin objectives of getting a reference and trying to do a sales job on me. Strangely enough it was a good call, it prompted me to think about the engagement in more detail and also get some names of some other CIOs working in NHS-land who I ought to reach out to. I left the call thinking that was a good sales interaction— that we both got something out of the call. Sadly that seems to be a very rare experience when talking to recruitment agencies, but has given me a bit of hope for future conversations.
A few of us had a demo of a software product called Eggplant which started off as a functional test automation software but is being used in more general RPA scenarios.
What would you have liked to do more of? Another week where I made no progressing on procuring the data visualisation tool for the Trust. I reached out on Twitter and on the Discourse network in the hope that someone had some documentation we could use as starter, but no luck so far.
What do you wish you could have changed? . We had another P1 incident on our network on Wednesday where the incoming Internet connection reached capacity. The team eventually worked out this was due to all our Apple devices going out to the Internet rather than being managed through our MDM solution. In a couple of weeks we’ll have our HSCN connection in place which will increase our capacity tenfold but there’s plenty to do in improving our network traffic management to avoid this sort of surprise.
What did you learn? A few of us joined a dry run for our public board using Teams Live Broadcast. Ian and the team had already played with it so this was an opportunity to see their good work in action.
I had a 1-2-1 with Anna. I enjoyed hearing all she’s been doing, particularly the work to progress the Digital Ambassador programme.
What did you enjoy? Starting working on our New Ways of Working workstream. Natasha has done some great work to get the various strands of work in some shape.
I enjoyed doing a retro with the leadership group at the event we call Leadership Brief. We didn’t have much time to review the cards, but I’ll do some curation over the weekend to draw out some themes. Giving sufficient silence for people to fill the cards on a Teams call was hard to achieve and perhaps a little strange on a video call. Next time I’m going to use some music to mark the time where opportunity to reflect in relative silence is permitted and needed!
What did you achieve? Shared the modelling output with my exec colleagues. Agreeing the agenda for Digital Hospital Committee with Alice. Talked about what the group model means for digital with Simon and Hugo.
What are you looking forward to next week? More modelling. Leadership Bookclub talking about Sorry I’m Late, I didn’t want to come.
Interesting Stuff read/consumed:
- How a digital offering supports the efficient use of technology and resources. Great article from Zoe Pink and lots we can learn from at KGH. Particularly liked the “Embracing a move from reviewing ‘what is happening’, to investigate the ‘why this is happening’ and how organisations can work together to change the future requirement”
- Can we turn kids into Grown ups in two months? Interesting observations on how kids schooling methods being used now — Google Classroom etc requires kids to acquire business skills such as regularly checking email so they don’t miss something.
- Our weird behavior during the pandemic is messing with AI models. None of the models were trained for us to suddenly change our shopping and travel habits — which has required human intervention.
- Doing a retrospective in a hospital Trust” by Ian Roddis. Great article from KGH’s very own Ian about using retros in an environment not familiar with agile ceremonies.
Books finished this week:
- Fiction: The Secret History by Donna Tartt. A great book — look forward to reading more from her in the future.
- Fiction: The Forgotten Affairs of Youth by Alexander McCall Smith. Book 8 of 10 from the Isabel Dalhousie series. He’s written loads of books and I’ve read from many of the different series, but Isabel is my fave.
- Non-Fiction: Sorry I’m Late, I didn’t want to come by Jessica Pan. Read this in good time ahead of our KGH Leadership Bookclub next week.
Currently Reading:
- Fiction: Beggars Banquet by Ian Rankin.
- Non-Fiction: Not picked the next one, but strongly suspect it will be Lou Downe’s book
