As part of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, NHS Lincolnshire is responsible for facilitating healthcare access to over 750,000 people and operating a budget of £1.2 billion. In tough economic times, the NHS faces significant budget constraints while demand for healthcare services continues to grow. To meet the challenge, NHS established a Project Management Office(PMO) that is working toward driving £20 billion of productivity gains over the next four years.

PMO Objectives

With the over-riding goal to maintain and improve the quality of healthcare delivery while simultaneously cutting costs, NHS uses PowerSteering to support four key PMO objectives: 1. increase visibility of projects and investments across the organization 2. assign a portfolio hierarchy to define dependencies in a complex delivery system 3. accelerate incentives to implement good project management practices and 4. assure that productivity benefits are realized and closely tracked.

System-wide Investment Analysis

In selecting PowerSteering, an identified strength was the software’s ability to accommodate a broad and diverse set of investments that support cross-organizational healthcare delivery. PowerSteering is used by the PMO to assess three categories of investments: service improvements, contracted services and corporate. Investments within these categories have different business process lifecycles depending on the stage of investment and size of project. With PowerSteering, NHS has a better grasp of the service improvement lifecycle and has expanded from an annual review cycle limited to £60 million in new investments; to a comprehensive planning process encompassing the entire spend of £1.2 billion, thus employing a more holistic approach to portfolio management.

Support for Contract Portfolio Management

Monitoring and improving healthcare delivery is particularly complex because services are contracted with many independent suppliers. PowerSteering captures information about every service contract in one system and allows NHS to align contracts by investment category, projected spend and lifecycle phase. Despite the change management challenges inherent in standing up a PMO, PowerSteering has given NHS Lincolnshire greater portfolio visibility and thereby increased assurance that the productivity benefits are on track to deliver.

Deployment Highlights:

• Smooth Deployment
• Streamlined reporting
• Enhanced risk management
• Improved portfolio decision making
• Better business continuity capabilities
• Precise project impact tracking
• Increased assurance of benefits realization

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