Our principles are our constants. They are important to us and we believe that they are the things we need to focus on to be a successful and healthy DDaT operation. We do not expect them to change over time, they will always be a priority for us.
Delivery: The strategy is delivery
Delivery is our first principle for a reason, it is crucial that we deliver for our customers and for our users if we are to consider ourselves successful.
This does not mean simply ‘getting things out the door’ or trying to fulfil every want. Instead, it means leveraging our DDaT expertise, agile principles and delivery practices to ensure that we balance speed, value and quality.
We aim to deliver value early on, iterating to provide improvements and further value resulting in high quality services and products which represent value to taxpayers, meet user needs and policy requirements, and do so on time and within budget.
Our commitment to delivery across the lifecycle of our products and services is central to this. We do not just build new services and hand them over. We make informed build or buy decisions and put a focus on reuse to deliver more efficiently. We provide the DDaT capabilities and service wrappers that run these services day in day out ensuring they are there when people need them.
Beyond this, we monitor customer feedback and service data and dedicate teams to the continuous improvement of our services throughout their lifetime ensuring they keep pace with the changing landscape and remain safe from emerging threats.
Where we work with third parties, we place a focus on supplier management to ensure that we get the most out of these relationships.
Finally, we retire, replace, or transform our services when the time comes, enabling us to leverage new technologies and ensuring that we spend our time maintaining only those services that are still needed.
People: Our people are our greatest strength
Just as the NHSBSA strategy recognises that our people are crucial to the overall success of the NHSBSA, within DDaT we recognise that our people, who design, build, maintain and run our services are central to our delivery. Our people are the corner stone to our reliability and the driving force behind our innovations. They are more than just a resource, they are our people and they are our greatest strength.
Our people principle supports the NHSBSA goal to be the best place any of us have worked, where everyone matters and colleagues can contribute, influence and flourish. We recognise that our people need to feel safe, valued, and motivated if they are to be able to bring their whole authentic selves to work and to bring their best in delivering our collective ambitions.
We place a high value on the wellbeing of individuals and strive to be an inclusive workplace that is welcoming to everyone.
Beyond this, we recognise how much our people give to our business and we seek to repay this by supporting them in achieving their own personal ambitions alongside providing opportunities for colleagues to enhance our organisation through our colleague networks. We already support our people to give back to our local communities through volunteering and fundraising, moving forwards we will promote these opportunities and actively support the NHSBSA target of donating 50,000 hours of volunteering.
In 2023 we launched our first DDaT People strategy setting out our priorities for continuing to support our people in the years to come. This will be followed up in 2024 with a comprehensive delivery plan aiming to enhance colleague experience across the colleague lifecycle. In line with our corporate People team, we will continue to focus on attraction and retention of colleagues. The professional capabilities of our people are invaluable but so is their understanding of our business and how we work so we seek to retain our colleagues wherever possible.
Profession: We recognise skills and experience
While our people are vital to our success, the skills and experience they bring to our organisation are also critical. Our directorate is one which cannot survive without the technical skills and capabilities of architects, developers, analysts, researchers, statisticians, designers, delivery managers and governance specialists and many others.
For this reason, we invest in colleagues’ development in their relevant professions, we provide them with professional as well as personal leadership and ensure they have time to attend and contribute to communities or practice. In addition, we strive for a ‘flat’ structure within our delivery teams recognising the importance of individuals feeling respected for the specialist knowledge they bring to our teams no matter their pay band.