Strathclyde support for Covid 19 rapid response plans

At the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic in Scotland, Kevin Page of Strathclyde Business School supported frontline NHS teams to develop and implement their rapid response plans.   With some staff working remotely, and the need to coordinate planning across several GP practices, he provided support using a methodology developed at Strathclyde by professors Colin Eden and Fran Ackermann.  It will be familiar to MBA students as ‘Making Strategy’. 

The process has been updated, with new software called ‘strategyfinder’, to enable it to support teams that work remotely, with each team member using their laptop to contribute to a live strategy conversation that captures input from everyone.  The overall view is displayed on participants’ laptops and the facilitator – also working remotely – can help the team negotiate, prioritise and plan.   Kevin facilitated a series of five workshops for the NHS to develop plans for target operating model, supply chain and team resilience. 

The workshops were never more than two hours long, the shortest was 30 minutes. Online strategy and planning work delivers tangible results in short periods of time. Teams scheduled workshops around their other commitments which meant that sessions were sometimes run in the evening or over the weekends. These bite-size strategy workshops were as productive as they were convenient. 

Kevin said, “It was a privilege to work with these teams. It’s true what is said about the NHS: the dedication and professionalism is astonishing. I witnessed true leadership in the most urgent of situations.”

Dr Nick Dunn from NHS Highland said, “When we realised the imminent scale of the Covid 19 Pandemic in Scotland, we knew we had to radically adapt our practices very quickly, whilst building new teams and protecting staff at a very vulnerable time. Professor Page helped us to develop strategy by capturing our concerns and ideas using approaches completely novel to us all, in the process pulling us together with a common vision and catalysing us into massive immediate action. All done remotely - within less than two weeks we had set up a Covid Assessment Centre, re-organised our Practice network and were already thinking beyond the peak. His contribution has been invaluable, opening our eyes to strategic methodology, with the added benefit that the positive impact on our team will be felt well into the future. “

 Alongside this, strategyfinder is being used to great effect with a range of companies in the UK and Australia, and in an international collaboration involving participants from several countries all contributing in real-time.