Project Management – Business Case

Brief:
Initial project scoping and business cases are suggested as being necessary to ensure understanding regarding what a project will seek to achieve including what it will include and exclude. The tools and techniques employed to do this will vary dependent upon the context and project type.

As a newly appointed project manager for the resurrection of below detailed NHS project, with reference to the literature and project management theory and models, Evaluate a range of tools and techniques which may be used to scope and develop a business case for the NHS IT project detailed below and compare and contrast these with tools which you would use to scope and develop a business case for an IT software / hardware upgrade type project in an organisation that you are familiar with. Evaluate how the context and project type impacts on the how the project is likely to be scoped, the project life cycle and the project management process.

NHS Data Management IT Project:
Circa 2003, the then UK Government embarked upon a project to link all parts of the National Health Service’s data. At the time, this was the largest civilian IT scheme ever attempted but it quickly started to miss deadlines, had specifications change, technical challenges and suppliers walking out of contracts agreed for the provision of both materials and services.
If you consider that the NHS in the UK is the world’s 5th largest employer, its actual organisational structure and ways in which cash is shared across the organisation changes relatively frequently, the actual services which it provides to ensure the health of the UK population does not.
NHS Services:

• Primary care – GP’s (local doctors which are usually a person’s first port of call if they are sick), dentists and pharmacists
• Secondary care – planned hospital care, emergency care (hospital accident and emergency, walk-in centres and also out of hours services and telephone support lines for advice and guidance)
• Mental health services
• Rehabilitation and postoperative care

Primary care providers and also secondary care administrators can commission services from the private sector too and so an NHS patient may not be treated in an NHS hospital.
Individual data is recorded whenever a person visits a health professional within any of these services provided aside from when they purchase medication available without a prescription from a doctor from a pharmacist. With a population of circa 60 billion people, this is a lot of data!

Information within an individual’s health records include:

• Personal data such as name, age and address
• Health conditions
• Treatments and medicines
• Allergies
• Tests, scans and x-ray results
• Lifestyle information
• Hospital admission and discharge information

The objective of the data project was to store all of this data within one database which all health professionals could access and update so that, for example, if an individual was attending an emergency service such as Accident and Emergency, especially out of hours, information such as their health conditions and any current medication being taken could be accessed by the doctors treating that individual rather than endeavouring to contact their primary health care provider when they are next able to do so.

Whilst you do not need to understand the project which ultimately failed and was cancelled, you can read the background to it online if you search for the NHS failed data integration project and at the following webpages:

https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Six-reasons-why-the-NHS-National-Programme-for-IT-failed

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2040259/NHS-IT-project-failure-Labours-12bn-scheme-scrapped.html

https://www.itpro.co.uk/it-infrastructure/31946/failed-nhs-it-system-will-cost-7m-to-stabilise