Informed Solutions & UK Health Security Agency: A Year of Successful Technology Business Partnering

Building Trusted, High-Performing Relationships

A vital element of helping our clients innovate and achieve transformational business results is building trusted relationships and collaborating closely over a sustained period of time.

Being able to quickly establish trust and authentic collaboration encourages the development of partnerships that work successfully and effectively towards joint achievement. With this in mind, it’s important to recognise and reflect on what makes these partnerships so successful, and how the lessons can be applied more widely.

One such partnership is our work with The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).

The Agency is in the midst of an important transformation from pandemic response to an enduring health protection service, with a remit to prevent, prepare for, and respond to infectious diseases and environmental hazards.

Technology plays a central role in the Agency’s ability to do this, whether specialist laboratory systems to analyse emerging health threats, systems to monitor and track the spread of infectious disease, or systems to help inter-agency collaboration, distributing knowledge and expertise, and remediation paths needed for effective pathogen response.

To perform its role, the Agency has a complex set of relationships spanning Central, Local and Devolved Government, as well as the NHS and numerous partners in the private sector.  It must ensure that its partners work effectively together, responding to complex technology challenges and at times, uncertain emerging threats to tight timescales.  This requires strong alignment of values and culture, so that blended technology teams work effectively together as one high performing unit.

UKHSA’s Technology Business Partnering (Tech BP) Team is responsible for delivering a substantial portion of the Agency’s digital transformation, and in addition to its own staff working across a range of DDaT disciplines, works closely with partners and champions a values-based approach to collaborative delivery.  Tech BP selected Informed Solutions a little over a year ago to work with them, as its Client-Side Partner.

As a values-based organisation, we have long understood that effective teamworking is built on common values and strongly support the Agency’s approach.  Tech BP has built on the Agency’s overall values of Inclusive, Insightful, Impactful, requiring that we all:

• Have a ‘one-team’ mindset that recognises that although we are working in a multi-organisation environment with complex inter-dependencies, our collective success depends on us all crossing the finish line together and supporting each other.
• Commit to delivering the outcomes the Agency needs, and not just tasks or new capabilities, so that the Agency fully benefits from its investment.
• Take responsibility and accountability for our work, making sure that we ‘do what we say’ and own our activities through to completion.
• Adopt a problem-solving approach that recognises that UKHSA faces unique challenges from new emerging threats, which can only be tackled through innovative thinking and a ‘can-do’ approach.
• Engage in respectful challenge and positive support to each other, regularly questioning and checking that we have the right approach as circumstances change, including drawing on the wisdom of the crowd and including all team members in developing solutions.
• Strive to continually improve, share and apply learning for inside and outside the Agency’s projects and programmes so that we are efficient and optimised in our delivery approach.

One year into our new working relationship with Tech BP, we are proud to have applied these values alongside Tech BP staff and other delivery partners.  In the first 12 months we have contributed to the successful delivery of 280+ outcomes, including five Discovery, Alpha and Beta stage deliveries and further digital support and change across 20 strategic areas of the business.  We also saw a near 50% increase in demand for our services from that planned in the early months of our engagement, as client areas of the Agency recognised the strength, depth, and quality of the blended teams Tech BP provided.

The importance of a values-based approach to delivery is often overlooked in the rush for solutions.  In these cases, failure to invest up-front in behaviours that help teams overcome complex challenges together quickly results in the development of functional relationships between teams that deliver mediocre outcomes, especially under pressure.  Tech BP’s approach recognises that common values are essential to high performing teams and partnerships, and are just as important as discipline skills, training and experience.  It’s a view shared by our own experience of 30+ years of technology delivery across the public and private sectors.

In a recent conversation, Mary Grice, UKHSA’s Deputy Director of Technology Business Partnering who has championed successful business partnering within the Agency was kind enough to lend some words to this blog on our partnership and the importance of values-based collaboration, saying: “I’ve been continually impressed by the quality of our partnership with Informed Solutions. They have lived our values, acted on feedback and are supporting me to successfully deliver critical agency programmes such as planning for emerging health threats. I am passionate about the importance of values-based business partnering and the power of high performing partner relationships. I greatly value Informed Solutions support in helping me improve the value and benefit the agency gets from its supplier partnerships.”