Intro
“With pagers having to be phased out until the end of 2021, NHS Trusts need to have an infrastructure in place until the end of September 2020. Responding to this need, Pando has developed a custom-built and unique pager replacement feature for NHS Trusts to replace pagers in a secure, efficient and cost-effective way. “ Stephanie Riley, Customer Success Lead at Pando.
This was a great summary of a project where one of the Pando’s cross-functional teams actively worked to solve a clear need: Replace non-urgent pagers across an entire organisation. We had a short notice deadline to apply for the NHS tender and we had a problem in front of us that persists since the 90s when the pagers started to disappear except in one place, hospitals.
I’m going to explain you the process we followed and how we tackled it from a product perspective.
Envision
First of all, we tried to understand how pagers work in a healthcare environment. Which are the strengths to keep using them nowadays or which are their weaknesses to turn them into opportunities? These were the main questions we did to the clinicians the team interviewed. This helped us to find the overarching themes, to know the differences between an urgent and not urgent pager and to discover there was something called “switchboard” that looks like it has been taken from a sci-fi film.
Once we extracted the key info from the interviews we continue empathising with some Journey Maps. This play allowed us to put into the shoes of a pager holder or someone who bleeps someone (bleeper) through different scenarios.
We discovered how frustrating was playing any of these two roles and how this ancient technology has survived over the years. Even when you have a very smooth journey trying to bleep someone for a non-urgent issue it could be a complete waste of time for both sides.
Identifying which elements of this journey were essential requirements and where the pain points were, it enabled us to create a list of user needs.
Next step was going to compare those needs with the features we already had in on Pando but as the clock ticked we realised that we had to build something from scratch, a new feature.
Then, with a little help of some healthcare professionals (the user always in the centre), we could sort those critical needs from the non-critical ones.
How might we meet each of these needs? The ideation exercise began with tons of ideas to solve those needs and to find improvement opportunities across the different actions of bleeping someone of receiving a bleep. At the end of the session, everyone voted for the best ideas and we, as a team, decided what it would be the requirements for a minimum viable experience (MVE) of Pando’s pagers.
Make
Defined what it was going to be our first concept of Pando’s pagers we designed a prototype to test it with some clinicians. The results of the usability tests suggested we were on the right way and a good signal appeared, second phase problems. These second phase problems, as I called them, are more complex needs that appear once you have solved the problems you were facing on the first stage.
After analysing the test results, we were ready to build it so we prepared the release of this new feature and divided it by four categories: the things we should do first, the things to do if we have time, the things we will probably do in the future and the things we will consider doing later.
Improve
The new feature was built, deployed and successfully released. Pager+ is now a reality giving healthcare professionals the same tool they were used to work with and some improvements like two-way, asynchronous communication, search and contact pager holders without calling switchboard or give clarity about the urgency to minimise disturbances.
While pagers feature team is waiting for more user feedback from the pilots to know the direction we should follow, it’s time to think of the things to improve for the next time:
Involve QA since the beginning is better than trying to explain the whole project in the middle of it.
Short time deadlines sometimes are good to stay focus on one project only and not be distracted by anything.