A snapshot of July
“Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do” — Pele
July has been one of the most challenging months of my career. At times I have really struggled to maintain a work-life balance whilst driving our Office 365 programme. I have always been an ambitious and determined individual, so it has been difficult to know when to step away when we have so much change to deliver in such short timescales.
The move to Office 365 online presents a huge change for the way many of our teams work. There are significant benefits for the Trust in terms of resiliency and security, and for our end users enhanced ability to collaborate and work anywhere without being tied to the Trust’s network. With any change of this magnitude comes a significant amount of change management to support our end users embracing and adapting to the change. With so much digital change being delivered across the Trust and holiday season in full swing, not to mention the continued pressure of the Covid-19 pandemic, many of our end users have needed additional support understanding how the changes will impact them and the way they work.
One of the projects under our Office 365 programme is to re-develop our inpatient discharge summary. Currently there are different platforms available to our clinicians dependent on the ward a patient is discharged from. We have been working on a discharge summary within our patient administration system (PAS) which will enable us to standardise the process for completing discharge summaries across the Trust. There is an encouraging drive from clinical leads to deliver this piece of work. As a Digital Transformation Project Manager in our Infrastructure team, I’ve relished the opportunity to step in to a project in our patient systems world. Not only am I enjoying working with new members of the broader digital team, it’s been interesting to work with clinical colleagues from across the Trust.
When I think about my biggest achievement of this month, I cannot shy away from my pride of being awarded a First Class BSc Honours degree with the Open University in Earth and Environmental Science. Having very quickly realised the conventional university route was not for me, I’ve devoted my evenings and weekends for the last six years to my degree. Whilst the subject of my degree is very distant from my day-to-day work at the Trust, it has provided me with so many invaluable skills that help me with my career as a Project Manager. Leaving Royal Holloway University aged 18 was the most difficult decision I have ever made, but it has been by far the best. My degree with the Open University has enabled me to learn more about a subject that has always fascinated me whilst building, and supplementing, my career as a Project Manager.
