01 February 2008
Calling all PCT data migration staff!
Last summer, TPP held their first data migration workshop. Since then, we’ve held four more, with representatives from a total of 21 PCTs attending. The workshops are an opportunity to meet representatives from both the TPP Data Migration team and CSC Rollout Services team.
Rai Mughal, CSC’s On-site Team Lead for Rollout Services, says, “The workshops are useful to increase awareness of the procedures and policies that TPP follows, workshops are appreciated by the majority of staff who like to see the type of thing that TPP does.”
Kirsty Lindsay, TPP Project Manager, is encouraging more PCTs to attend the workshops. “The workshops are beneficial to the PCT staff and to us. We both get to find out how the other works and to understand each other better. This ultimately leads to a better relationship and smoother data migrations.”
Kirsty continues, “It should be an enjoyable couple of hours - it’s not a conference or a lecture. We take guests around the offices to meet all of our teams and see what we do. It’s good for them to put faces to names and likewise, we like to meet the people we’re working with. There’s an opportunity for us to explain how we work and how we can help the staff help the units in deployment. Then the PCT staff can raise any questions or issues they have and we can answer them.”
In November, Ann Lightowler and Philip Crabtree, Information Facilitators from Barnsley PCT, visited TPP as they were starting their first SystmOne data migration. Ann explains why they were interested in attending the workshop: “Our job is to ensure that practices within the PCT are following good practice guidelines, that they’re achieving good data quality, and that they’re using systems to their potential. We’ll be involved in data checking with practices moving to SystmOne so wanted to meet the people at TPP who would be working on the data migration.”
For Ann and Philip, the visit was worthwhile - “We haven’t done system migration for some time in Barnsley, so it was quite useful to understand the process and to meet the helpdesk and migration team. It gave us increased confidence about the processes involved. I would recommend that other PCT data migration staff attend the workshops as it’s a good opportunity to meet everyone at TPP.”
Ann continues, “It was really nice to see how integrated the teams are - everyone works together, even the directors sit amongst the rest of the staff. It was interesting to see the screen in the helpdesk area showing the connectivity of all the practices by PCT. It is clear that TPP is focussed - they’re not waiting for a phone call to find out that there’s a problem, they’ll know about it first.”
TPP is confident that PCT attendance at the workshops will lead to more and more successful deployments. Kirsty says, “We like to invite people from different places and with different levels of familiarity with data migration, so that everybody can share their experiences and lessons learned. We’re all working towards the same goal - providing practices with a smooth transition to a system that’s going to benefit them and their patients, so it’s much better if we work together. We’re looking forward to meeting more of our PCT colleagues throughout 2008."
If you'd like to attend a workshop over the next few months, please call us on 0113 20 500 83 or email us.
