Welsh Blood Service

Staff were frustrated at the painfully slow, laborious, and dull paper-based processes in place for both regulatory requirements and the business planning elements of their transformation programme, so there was a need to do something significant.

The Welsh Blood Service is responsible for the collection of blood in Wales, and of the distribution of blood products to hospitals within the country. As well as managing blood donation and distribution, they manage other related functions such as research and development into public health and therapies and a substantial amount of fund raising and awareness to increase the country’s blood levels for donation.

The team’s old system required them to produce documents at each stage of the change management process, and when there was an update, the document was required to be re-done to include that update, resulting in an unnecessary amount of extra work for individuals, and less impact overall.

Incomes Verto 365. Not a dedicated change management programme, but a flexible and configurable project management platform that Welsh Blood saw could meet their requirements.

“We set out wanting to use Verto to manage change, and manage the capacity to deliver that change”

The solution:

Despite Verto 365 not traditionally being used in this way, the platform is specifically designed to provide complete flexibility to shape into a recognisable, and logical set of tools for individual organisations.

The Welsh Blood team were able to see potential in moulding the platform to fit their requirements. For example, instead of using the gateway stages as a traditional project management approach, they redesigned into a process framework to move change documents through stages, allowing for the layering of additional information within those same documents as it is required.

Further significant changes were made around Verto 365’s implementation. All at once, they opted to shift accountability from various departments to change managers themselves, moved from a paper-based system to digital, and with that came updated and improved processes.

The new processes led the updates in accountability. Rather than ownership of change being managed by department heads, change owners took accountability since they now had the tools to map the work being done. This was helped by building up their own configured dashboards, suited for all levels, such as senior management, department heads, and individuals to drive the positive culture of accountability and ownership to the change managers.

“What’s really exciting is the dashboard functionality… We’re trying to change a culture here, to move accountability and ownership from department heads to the change owners themselves…so dashboards that we can configure to every level is going to help with culture change and ownership”

The change to a digital system was also a steep learning curve, along with the new processes that went along with that, but the Verto team provided a lot of support in the form of training and are only now beginning to step back with less hand-holding.

Despite the sudden shift, buy-in was easy to achieve as the benefits from moving away from the old paper-based system were clearly communicated. Improvements in the flow of work through the organisation, reduced a double up of work and set more efficient processes.

“We saw the benefit in Verto was to reconfigured it to suit our requirements in a much more effective and visual way than our old paper-based system”

Next steps:

While Welsh Blood have been using their bespoke system in this newly configured way, by aligning the gateway stages with their processes, they are now starting to explore the platform for some of its more original uses.

“For the last 18 months we’ve been using it to visualise the change process, and now we’re starting to use the project management elements”

The management of work through dashboards is ongoing, and work is well underway on developing specific data for the dashboards depending on the stakeholder level and what is required to be seen.

“Verto has completely replaced our paper-based system, which was a huge undertaking for our organisation. With the continued support from the Verto team, we have been able to move to a completely digital process for tracking and managing our change management programmes and tailored the Verto 365 platform to fit our needs and processes.” – Rhianydd McGovern, Project Support Manager at Welsh Blood

Additional information:

The Verto club is a monthly meeting involving several like-minded organisations within the Welsh Heath sector who also use Verto. The meetings are an idea sharing space to develop knowledge on Verto and share ways of working. Verto members also attend on a semi-regular basis to provide information and updated on ways to use the tools.

Verto 365 has been highly configured for Welsh Blood to become a solution that matches the processes they need, which was possible due to it being a highly versatile solution. Verto 365 enables each department and organisation to create their own configuration but link and report across multiple sites. For Welsh Blood, reports have also been developed with their specific needs in mind to benefit certain departments, which adds to their tailored system. Continuous improvements mechanisms are also firmly in place, so the system is ever evolving with improvements constantly being tested for incremental upgrades.

While Verto is a project management solution first and foremost, Welsh Blood have proven that the platform’s scalability and customisation available means it can be used to further advance companies with varying structures in place.