5 Key Takeaways: Supercharging Your Health Live Services

At the inaugural UK Tech Week, a national initiative showcasing tech innovation across the UK, our Lunch and Learn as part of the Leeds offer, "Supercharging Your Health Live Services," co-hosted with techUK, proved to be a thought-provoking deep dive into the importance of your Service Ops Team in enabling product delivery with examples of how this can be delivered in digital health services of population scale.

Led by our Head of Service Operations, Terry Hancock, and joined by Samantha Robinson, Associate Director of Live Services at NHS England, our audience was treated to a practical overview with critical insights of ‘what good looks like’ in the enablement of product teams by Service Ops, the foundations such as automation, observability, estate management and user centricity that need to be in place and how this worked in practice for the National Health Service teams.

Together, we explored the strategic implementation of a Service Ops digital health checks and evaluation techniques, that are improving the landscape of NHSE Live services. From uncovering how these innovations are reshaping operational efficiency, reducing costs, and enhancing user satisfaction in healthcare technology in demanding circumstances to delving deep into the history of Service Operations and its paradigm shift. These were the key takeaways of the afternoon.

Shift from Governance to Enablement

Traditional Service Operations focus on governance and control, but modernisation demands a shift towards enabling product teams to deliver secure, resilient, and reliable products and services. This entails empowering product teams to take accountability for their products' performance in production.

Customer-Centricity

Service Operations must adopt a customer-centric mindset, designing processes around the needs of both internal and external users. Processes should be continuously optimised for usability, cost-efficiency, and meeting user needs, treating the service catalogue like a commercial product.

Roles of Service Operations

Service Operations should function as a control and assurance function, establishing frameworks, standards, and SLAs while also serving as a platform providing helpdesk support, managing releases and incidents, and offering ITSM tooling. Additionally, it should act as an expert team, embedding service managers into whole service teams and providing specialised support.

Platform Approach

Service Operations should operate as a platform, abstracting complex tasks into simple services, enhancing flow, and reducing cognitive load for product teams. This approach facilitates the integration of product delivery and service operations, promoting rapid changes and continual improvement.

Steady Incremental Change

Achieving modernisation in Service Operations requires steady and incremental change, building on your core operational foundations. Organisations should seize opportunities for improvement, streamline processes, optimise tooling strategies, and promote a proactive, platform-based approach to support continual improvement and rapid technological changes.

Do you want to lunch and learn with us?

Your organisation can transition from traditional operations to a proactive, user-centric, and platform-based approach in Service Operations, ultimately enhancing service reliability and reducing time to market. We can show you how. Book a call ordownload our latest report – 'Service Operations as Platform.'