Going Paperless

Barts CharityBarts Charity is an independent healthcare charity which funds pioneering research

and innovation in patient care working with Barts Health NHS Trust (five hospitals in

East London) and The Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry (part

of Barts Health NHS Trust)

Vision

To be a leading charity promoting extraordinary healthcare

Mission

To grant funds for innovative projects promoting improvements in patient care,

medical research and health education, which falls outside NHS funding

A team of 30 dedicated staff manage multi-year high and low value grants, expense

reimbursement service associated with over 700 restricted funds, fundraising and

investments

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Challenges and Issues• Organically grown systems meant the needs of the Charity and its

beneficiaries were not met.

• Lack of 3600 view due to decentralised systems- 3 separate databases

(Finance/Grants/Fundraising)

• Silo working, duplication and uncoordinated strategic effort

• Bureaucratic with paper-based systems used for applications, procurement,

reimbursement and budget and impact tracking

• A lack of clear data strategy

• All this contributed to a culture that perpetuated the silo based approach

depicted above

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Project Challenges

• Internal and external stakeholder buy-in

• Working with multiple suppliers – Finance systems suppliers, ICT provider,

digital partner, etc.

• Limited resources

• External stakeholders working on archaic operating systems

• Tight timeline for project delivery

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Start of the Journey…Identify keys to success - faced with challenging objectives and a five month delivery

timeline, the planning and delivery decisions were critical to our success

• Executive support

• Day-to-day operational and strategic support was provided by the Finance Director

and Operations.

• CEO contributed with rapid but rigorous issue resolution. This enabled staff to

challenge the status quo and approach change with good humour and openness.

• Partner selection

• Appointment of an external consultant, Anne Nunan, to manage the discovery,

appointment of partner and achievement of objectives.

• The selection of Hyphen8 as the implementation partner.

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Start of the journey (continued)• Bottom-up consultation

A focus on user adoption and the nomination of champions to represent each team,

fostered a culture of collaboration and facilitated input from all staff on all aspects of

the change.

• Project delivery methodology

Requirements workshops that engaged staff and encouraged the adoption of new

working practices.

• External buy in

Stakeholder representatives, including key fund-holders, trustees, hospital and

university staff.

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Next StepsOstensibly, the change was technical infrastructure. The challenges, however,

were seen across the organisation:

• A structured realignment of internal communications, internal culture, role

accountability and development of collaborative frameworks

• Designing an external stakeholder engagement strategy

• Standardising and migrating data to a central database

• Transitioning to online data capture forms for each stage of the grant

management and expense reimbursement process

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Next Steps (continued)• Customising data entry and data import routines to reflect the wide range

of income generation channels

• Designing, implementing and embedding the selected solution, Salesforce

to replace the fundraising and grant management systems

• Bi-directional integration of Salesforce and Access Dimensions, the finance

system, electronic authorisation whilst retaining rigorous financial control

and accountability

• Development of dynamic fund balance tracking solutions and automating

fund statements for the multiple external stakeholders

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Outcomes• Online end-to-end grants process providing visibility of pre-endorsement stages

assisting grantees whilst informing internal capacity and funding planning

• Dynamic role-specific dashboards providing instant visibility of comprehensive and

accurate analytics reducing the time spent producing management reports to just

a few minutes

• Average processing time of large grants reduced from 7 to 2 days improving

applicant experience

• Exponentially improved the accuracy and speed of data entry through online grant

applications

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Outcomes (continued)• Shared data visibility across the organisation and data categorisation

• Improved alignment of potential donors to grant projects

• Improved donor conversions through market segmentation and targeting

• Improved operational effectiveness and productivity with Cloud

technologies, amongst other things, facilitating flexible working for staff

• Fundraising, grants and finance teams working collaboratively.

Champions continue to meet and consider organisational and system

enhancements

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Most Importantly…• Business as usual continued seamlessly throughout with the final migration

taking place over a bank holiday weekend and the project was delivered to

time, scope and budget receiving a glowing reference from KPMG, appointed

to audit the achievement of project objectives

• Delivered fundamental organisational change and a foundation on which to

make a real difference to healthcare, now and in the future

Grant applicant quote…

“I have tested the registration and completion of new forms, trying to ‘mess up’ at every

stage, everything works flawlessly, seems very clear and straightforward from an

applicant’s perspective, and the design (in my humble opinion) is excellent”

Restricted fund-holder quote…

“Thanks a million, this is amazing…”

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