Department of Health, NHS Electronic Staff Record programme
Benefits activation project
The NHS Electronic Staff Record (ESR) programme is a multi-million pound IT system designed to modernise the NHS’s HR and payroll processes. It enables NHS trusts to streamline processes, have greater visibility of staff management information, standardise routine HR transactions, and provide greater autonomy to managers and employees.
At the point of SHM’s appointment, the ESR programme had been operating for over two years and was approaching a critical project review stage. Although the system had been implemented successfully in a number of trusts, the ESR programme team needed to validate the benefits of the implementation to demonstrate the programme’s compliance with OGC Gateway Review 5 (‘Benefits realisation’), and to lay the foundations for full rollout across the whole NHS system.
SHM was commissioned by the NHS ESR Programme not merely to evaluate the benefits emerging from the implementation of ESR, but actively to drive out benefits by working with participating trusts to make changes to processes and ways of working. The project involved intensive work with eight NHS trusts in England and Wales using a range of value tracking and benefits activation tools designed specifically for this programme. SHM worked closely with the NHS ESR Central Team and with ESR staff on-site at each trust to engage stakeholders and confirm commitments to implementation, to drive usage of the ESR functionality, to make associated organisational/process changes, and to activate and record benefits. This has involved liaison with the NHS ESR programme design team, functional specialists, and implementation consultants, as well as executive sponsors, project managers, directorate and department heads and other staff at each trust.
SHM designed and executed this evaluation project over the course of six months. Our work included:
Benefits activation project
The NHS Electronic Staff Record (ESR) programme is a multi-million pound IT system designed to modernise the NHS’s HR and payroll processes. It enables NHS trusts to streamline processes, have greater visibility of staff management information, standardise routine HR transactions, and provide greater autonomy to managers and employees.
At the point of SHM’s appointment, the ESR programme had been operating for over two years and was approaching a critical project review stage. Although the system had been implemented successfully in a number of trusts, the ESR programme team needed to validate the benefits of the implementation to demonstrate the programme’s compliance with OGC Gateway Review 5 (‘Benefits realisation’), and to lay the foundations for full rollout across the whole NHS system.
SHM was commissioned by the NHS ESR Programme not merely to evaluate the benefits emerging from the implementation of ESR, but actively to drive out benefits by working with participating trusts to make changes to processes and ways of working. The project involved intensive work with eight NHS trusts in England and Wales using a range of value tracking and benefits activation tools designed specifically for this programme. SHM worked closely with the NHS ESR Central Team and with ESR staff on-site at each trust to engage stakeholders and confirm commitments to implementation, to drive usage of the ESR functionality, to make associated organisational/process changes, and to activate and record benefits. This has involved liaison with the NHS ESR programme design team, functional specialists, and implementation consultants, as well as executive sponsors, project managers, directorate and department heads and other staff at each trust.
SHM designed and executed this evaluation project over the course of six months. Our work included:
- Creation of a benefits activation and tracking process that provided a systematic initial baseline review of key finance and HR activities and their associated costs
- Execution of a detailed interview process involving regular engagement with directors in the eight Trusts to help understand the detail behind the organisational and process changes enabled by ESR
- Development and implementation of a rigorous benefits activation tool designed to identify a total cost saving for each key process area enabled by the ESR system (compared to the initial baseline measure). The tool focused on translating improvements to levels of sickness absence enabled by ESR into an accurate cost saving.
