// 01The context
At NHS Digital, Axiologik personnel were accountable for a programme portfolio of more than £150m a year in FY20-21, rising to £325m in FY21-22. Many of the services in that portfolio were either created in response to the pandemic or put under severe pressure to deliver faster, to relieve the front line.
NHS Digital needed experienced digital delivery leadership that understood how to build large-scale, critical national services at pace — inside a complex enterprise architecture, in a regulated environment, and under extraordinary time pressure.
It is a difficult place to deliver: a heterogeneous technical landscape, multiple stakeholders and layered governance. Few suppliers can take on senior leadership of programmes at that scale and complexity.
"Axiologik are highly competent and absolutely reliable. Our ability to respond to the pandemic would have been greatly diminished without their support."
— SARAH WILKINSON, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, NHS DIGITAL
// 02What we did
We provided executive leadership across the whole product development portfolio, including direct programme leadership to establish the digital services and infrastructure underpinning COVID-19 testing and vaccinations.
Beyond the COVID programmes, our people led at portfolio level across the major national, citizen-facing services — nhs.uk, the NHS App and 111 Online — as well as critical services across urgent and emergency care, primary care and cancer screening.
Testing and vaccinations had to mobilise and start delivering immediately. We put expert programme and delivery management teams into both, driving the pace while holding on to user-centred design and disciplined delivery control. Speed did not come at the cost of rigour.
// 03The results
Axiologik people played a fundamental role in the NHS's digital response to COVID-19: from directly leading the design, build and scaling of the testing and vaccinations services, to establishing a relentless pace of delivery across a much broader range of citizen and NHS-facing products.
Throughout, we drove a focus on holistic service design, user-centricity and mature engineering practices, so that high-quality services could be released and iterated significantly faster than the NHS had previously delivered.
That approach, tested under the unique pressures of a pandemic, is now regarded as an exemplar of how to deliver complex, critical digital services at pace in healthcare.
