The Project

 

Devon Partnership Trust has been in existence for almost 15 years and provides services to 18,000 people with an annual budget of about £130m.

 

The Trust wanted to commission a review of the entire IM&T function.  The remit was to look in detail at governance, strategy, operational capacity and service delivery and training.

 

Why Sirius

Sirius Partners was in discussion with the Trust and submitted a proposal for the assignment.  Although not the lowest-priced bid, the Trust decided after careful consideration that it was the Sirius bid that produced the best value. 

 

What We Did

The Sirius review team spent time rigorously reviewing documents and taking care to understand the context and the history of the Trust.  They then conducted in depth interviews with key stakeholders and staff, and spent time in a training workshop.

 

Sirius was determined throughout that, unlike many such reviews conducted by others, the staff would be engaged and involved throughout.  If staff feel alienated from the process, the review is less accurate and helpful and implementation becomes much more challenging.  The Sirius team worked hard to ensure a positive outcome for services, clients, finances and the staff.

 

The team targeted identifying service delivery gaps and recommending practical actions that could be taken quickly and clearly to improve performance.  The team recognised the huge progress that had been made by the IM&T team, and also the historical environment they were working in and the problems that had caused.  Throughout, the focus of the Sirius Team was to analyse the current situation and propose tangible actions that can be taken to resolve issues.

 

The Result

After the insight gathering and analysis phase was complete the Sirius review team found a number of significant areas for improvement, each of which individually posed a risk to effective operational delivery of the required level of IT service to end users within the Trust. Taken as a whole, this increased significantly the risk to the successful delivery of IT-enabled change programmes such as the Smart Recovery Programme and the EPR 2015 Programme.

 

Sirius presented the Board with a series of detailed and specific recommendations and a high-level action plan with allocated responsibility for each action and suggested timescales.

 

This review, analysis and series of recommendations put the Trust in an extremely positive position to move forward in what is an ever changing and problematic NHS environment.

 

What the Client Said

As a result, Sirius received the following testimonial from the commissioning officer:

 

I commissioned Sirius to review the IT services within our Trust.  Their considered and professional approach engaged and inspired our staff.  Their end product was a first class comprehensive report with a detailed action plan that was ready to implement and had total staff buy in.  I would thoroughly recommend their service.

 

Sarah Brampton, Director of Finance