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Sprint 3

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Application Capability Framework delivery team at SCW
Published

Framing the problem

Li Jenkins-Twist’s background to OAM was really useful context, as was the OAM team’s draft L1 and L2 business capabilities.

To develop truly joined-up care, we need to step back and develop a shared view of how the system functions – what capabilities we need, the reality of patient journeys across care pathways, and where technology supports delivery. Not from the perspective of a single organisation, but from the intended outcomes and the perspective of the people the system is meant to serve. - Li Jenkins-Twist, NHSE Chief Enterprise Architect

The ACF team needed to work out how to present this shared view to users, relevant to their real-world tasks and priorities. The team knew from user research in its discovery that to be successful, the information service would need to be useful, usable and used.

Phrased as questions, this grouped the recommendations into potential solutions (and assumptions) to test in the alpha:

How can we make sure that OAM ACF is “useful”?

  1. design specific tools and functionality that supports users and use cases identified through research
  2. show how OAM ACF can be used to support specific tasks, eg planning to deliver national and local priorities for service transfer and improvement
  3. provide direct, explicit links to good practice, such as the NHS What Good Looks Like framework and NHS Blueprints on the FutureNHS website (login required).

How can we make sure that OAM ACF is “usable”?

  1. make the framework easily findable, open and accessible for anyone to use
  2. co-design, test and iterate user journeys and outcomes with its intended users
  3. develop simple, intuitive search and browse functionality based on user needs

How can we make sure that OAM ACF is “used”?

  1. show that the framework is up-to-date and continues to evolve and iterate over time, eg an open service roadmap and meaningful versioning (a key research finding from discovery)
  2. work with suppliers to understand their priorities and reflect how individual application capabilities move from being experimental, to emerging, to established
  3. monitor its use (through analytics and research) to identify areas for improvement and opportunities to link and integrate with other resources

Moving from planning to delivery

The end of sprint 3 marked the end of the alpha’s scoping and planning. The team so far had:

  • designed a conceptual model for the information service
  • built a rapid prototype in WordPress with a fully featured CMS and NHS styling
  • created hierarchical and non-hierarchical taxonomies to test and refine through user research
  • developed prototype search tools (A to Z and faceted search) to test with users
  • explored how application capabilities relate to business capabilities, service types and other elements of the OAM metamodel
  • developed a consolidated data import spreadsheet from the various, individually formatted and structured, spreadsheets for DCF products
  • developed a data import and export function so that content could, if desired, be maintained entirely in Excel
  • prototyped functionality to export specific subsets of the OAM ACF as csv and xls

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