CASE STUDY ASSIGNMENT

Case study assignment - NHS



Case study assignment - NHS

The discussion will seek to present an understanding of the ability to operationalise a change control process and an extended ability to apply ICT to business operations in the context of NHS, UK. The discussion will critically reflect on and appraise the critical path and dependencies while working through analysis, design and implementation. In the process of doing so, the following paragraphs will demonstrate an ability to phase deliverables and ensure that future development is part of the initial conception of a system. The essential purpose of the discussion is to demonstrate an ability to manage changes in the light of client feedback and other changes in the environment of the project while reflecting on the ability to factor in HCI issues that are factors in developing and deploying ICT systems in business operations. In order to do so, it will be imperative to comprehend, work with and innovate in a contemporary business process context.

Academic literature is pessimistic about the potential of the personnel function to adopt the role of a change maker. Reforms in the NHS are an opportunity for the personnel function to play a significant role in the strategic change process. The personnel function may take up a different role in relation to different issues. In response to the earlier reforms at trust level, there is an array of organizational initiatives and associated managerial rhetoric which constitutes trust strategy in response to government policy (Hudson 2011). To a large extent strategy is determined at trust board level and provides a framework within which operational and support areas carry out their work. Thus we see a business planning cycle introduced in trusts, local pay initiatives, quality initiatives as a result of external auditing by bodies such as the Kings Fund, and a move in some trusts towards strategic business unit arrangements.

Under the Griffiths Report a new cadre of general (line) managers were given the strategic role of `change agents' in initiating a cultural metamorphosis within the NHS. These managers are at the epicentre of an ideological storm dominated by the rhetoric of market rationality and the severe organizational pressures which it necessarily imposes on a highly complex, and often fragile, `negotiated order', at the level of work organization and service delivery (Abraham 2009). On one hand there has been literature which suggests evidence of transformatory change in the UK NHS. On the other hand a great deal more of the literature suggests that transformation of the UK NHS along managerialist lines is problematic and that there is conflict between different interests in the realization of managerialist strategies.

The role of most interest to us is that of `change maker' who attempts to influence the context in which managers carry out their human resource activity. The `change makers' are those who make an intervention based and strategic contribution and who are thus the closest to the idea of the human resource manager (Loan-Clarke, Arnold, Coombs, Bosley and Martin ...