Children’s Hospice South West

Children’s Hospice South West is a registered charity that provides palliative, respite, end of life and bereavement care for life-limited and terminally ill children and their families from the South West England region. It oversees three of the 41 children’s hospices in the United Kingdom.

Project Context

Children’s Hospice South West sought Nine Feet Tall’s assistance to review and accelerate a long-stalled technology project within their Care Team. After four years of challenges, including procurement iterations and leadership changes, they faced implementation fatigue alongside stretched resources. With regulatory changes mandating a digital system for patient data, CHSW turned to Nine Feet Tall to navigate the complexities and deliver the solution efficiently.

Project Delivery

The project required an injection of comprehensive project management, change management, and business analysis activities. An initial reassessment of the project status was important to gather initially to inform the core deliverables and create a roadmap aligning with CHSW’s strategy. Following this, Nine Feet Tall engaged with key stakeholders to ensure alignment and buy in was present. As a result, the right levels of governance were setup, allowing autonomy and collaboration to exist, and robust project reporting was implemented.

Change management efforts focused on communication refinement, business readiness, training strategy, and benefits realisation. Ultimately, keeping all key stakeholders and the wider team informed, present and valued in the change process to ease transition. Continuous business analysis activities ran throughout the project to ensure alignment with the CHSW strategy and to keep it running to time. These include process analysis, test management, and ensuring requirements traceability. Ultimately, through Nine Feet Tall’s expertise and change management capability the project was up and running once more at the necessary pace to meet regulation.

Outcomes

As a result of these efforts, the successful adoption of new processes and operational use of the digital system was achieved by the Care Team. With desktop and handheld devices operational, data is now stored centrally, enhancing efficiency and driving consistency across hospices. Furthermore, this improved collaboration between hospices, allowing shared user experiences and the streamlining of access to necessary information. The successful implementation of this new system positively impacted 1000’s of users within the Care Team.

Nine Feet Tall worked alongside our digital colleagues, providing expert project management support from start to finish. This specialist support ensured the transition to the new digital system ran as smoothly as possible.

CHSW Deputy CEO, Jess Patel