How Mid Yorkshire NHS Trust provides more efficient, collaborative care with monday.com

As part of the National Health Services of England, the Mid Yorkshire Teaching NHS Trust (“Mid Yorks”) cares for over half a million people in their area every year. It provides medical services across three hospital sites, as well as home and community care throughout the region.

Although Mid Yorks operates independently from the larger NHS, it consistently coordinates on large projects with the national teams, primary and social care orgs, and other acute secondary trusts.

Simply put, the trust has a lot to manage. And with its life-changing work, the stakes are high to operate smoothly.

To manage and deliver the best care, Mid Yorks needed the right work software.

“As every hospital in the UK has at the moment, we've got a huge push to move to being more digital,” explains Tom Mitchell, Digital Business Change Manager, “and we've got a really good appetite for digital transformation within our organization.”

Even with that appetite, they needed to find the right software fit for Mid Yorks’ needs, says Kat Poole, Associate Director for Digital Services: “We have to be quite flexible, quite adaptable, and we have to be able to work as a team.”

The digital services team outlined Mid Yorks’ opportunities for improvement:

• Visibility: With so many ongoing projects across the org, Mid Yorks lacked a time-efficient way to track it all. Stakeholders resorted to asking multiple people for updates and sorting through documents. “We just wanted a single view to click and understand exactly where we are,” says Tom.


• Consistent data: “We did struggle with continuity between projects, because a lot of the information was in people's heads,” Tom says. “I always use the analogy of, ‘If something dramatic happened to me, how on earth would somebody pick up the projects that I was working on?’”


• Accountability: There was no clear view of all ongoing tasks and projects, which led to delays and details dropped. “There was no way of tying it all back to individuals or helping people stay accountable,” explains Kat.


• Finding the perfect fit: Some software worked well for project management team members, but that didn’t mean other stakeholders wanted to use them — especially with varying levels of comfort with technology.

“We were struggling to find something that was a one-size-fits all. We also didn’t want a cumbersome way of managing lots of different systems, or anything extremely heavy on licensing, support, etc.” says Kat.

The search for platforms quickly brought a match when Tom connected with Mid Yorks’ Community Transformation Program Director, who was already using monday.com.

“monday.com seemed to tick most, if not all of the boxes,” remembers Kat. “My first impression was that it was so intuitive. It’s nice on the eyes, it’s quick, it’s slick, it’s absolutely easy to use and easy to understand.”

“We've got home-based working now for a lot of us, and it's about being able to dig into it and go, ‘Right, I know exactly where that project is now,’ and it's all live information,” Tom says.

So Mid Yorks’ digital PMO (project management office) started exploring the functionality and flexibility of the platform, to positive results.

Even as teams were working from home, word of monday.com spread fast.

“That first year we got a lot of calls from other people outside of my department wanting it, after they had seen the capabilities and the opportunities,” says Kat.

Since the start, Tom and Kat worked with monday.com’s customer success team to map out their project processes and bring together their data. “They are the absolute oracles for us,” explains Tom. “They always come back with a solution, which is really gratifying.”

“It’s been a very evolutionary process, because we started with one problem and realized all these other things we could do,” says Tom.

Today, Mid Yorks uses monday.com to manage training, tasks, reporting, budgeting, and more.

“That’s one of the beauties of the platform: the flexibility to go, ‘You know what, that'd be really good to do on monday.com.’”

One of the most impressive use cases Mid Yorks have set up: centralizing project budget planning across the next 10 years.

Before monday.com, budgeting was managed in a 43-tab spreadsheet with tons of line items on each tab. Teams spent hours manually digging through the tabs and crunching numbers. Data, context, and insights were falling through the cracks.

“An absolute lifesaver for us is we've moved all of our capital spreadsheets onto monday.com, and we're rolling it out to the other departments within the division of infrastructure now as well,” says Tom.

Mid Yorks’ teams now build much more accessible, functional budget plans.

“We put together a process whereby we can score each of the schemes and prioritize them, we can assign people, we can update statuses, and we’ve filtered the dashboards by years,” Kat says. “It’s just so much easier on monday.com.”

“At a glance it’s really valuable information,” says Tom. “You can just go in and quickly pick out where you've overspent, where things are going wrong, and where things are going right.”

Different stakeholders can pull the data they need instantly with customized filters — be it by year, business case status, spend type, forecast dates, and more. They can also add views to visualize data the way they prefer, like line items, dashboards, Gantt charts, or calendars.

Just as important: all that data comes with context. Decisions and team discussions are tied directly to their relevant tasks and elements of the budget. “When we’re chasing things, particularly at the end of the financial year, we can see the full context in the comments,” says Kat.

Mid Yorks’ project dashboards are reliable and up to date, because the data is constantly updated by the stakeholders who work on it.

Tom used to need to nudge people for updates. Now, monday.com automatically notifies project owners when something needs to be done or reviewed. That translates to time and energy saved on all sides.

“It’s time saved and a cultural shift, to be honest with you,” says Tom.

Engagement has increased across teams with monday.com’s user-friendly interface. “People before were always nervous to use spreadsheets because they were ‘owned by finance,’” Tom explains. Today, more stakeholders can manage their own budgets and spending.

“We have digital operations managers who have never touched a capital spreadsheet in their lives, and they absolutely love this. They’re techies through and through. But they look at this and say, ‘This is so easy.’”

As more teams engage with the platform, they see how their reporting and spending benefit both the outcome of each project and Mid Yorks’ big-picture mission. In turn, employees feel more motivated and empowered.

“With spreadsheets, it was hard for people to see the impact,” says Kat. “Now, at the end of the financial year we have 5-6 people working on the budgets, understanding the context and taking ownership.”

Kat now saves crucial time on strategic planning and monthly reporting to Mid Yorks’ capital group.

“I used to take screenshots of spreadsheets on an ongoing basis, spending quite a lot of time manually calculating, confirming the calculations, updating them, and analyzing lots of different tabs,” she says.

Her decision-making became a lot clearer with monday.com.

“From a leadership perspective, I’m able to take these dashboards really, really quickly knowing that that’s exactly where we’re at, without having to do all this manual input.

Instead of being bogged down in the details, I could raise myself up and operate on a higher, more strategic level.”

Clear visualizations have also enhanced the way she reports to the larger NHS.

“When we report on outputs like Gantt charts and timelines, it’s been invaluable for me to send that monday.com snapshot or share my screen in real-time on calls. It’s easy to share and easy for the national teams to understand,” she says.

Tom has seen the impact of monday.com through the sheer amount of new requests he gets from teams for new licenses.

“monday.com has been really well taken up by the organization,” he says. “On a daily basis I'm getting people dropping me messages, saying, ‘Oh, I've seen this platform, When can we have it?’”

As Mid Yorks’ impact grows, Kat notes the benefits of adopting monday.com org-wide: “Over the time I’ve been here, I’d say the team has tripled in size; also the type of work that we do, the volumes of work that we do, and the pressures on digital services and the programmes team have intensified.

I think monday.com gives a great opportunity to get that oversight of all the projects going on. I know from the other ways that I’ve used it that we absolutely can get there.”

Consistent reporting on one platform can make a massive difference, she says. “Now, when the head of medical devices, the head of estates, and I are working on our capital plans, we’re reporting in the same format.” With consistent data, other teams’ insights are clearer and reports can be combined to fuel even higher-level strategy.

“The way that we look at monday.com is that it’s never a finished product,” says Tom. “There's always more we can do as an organization to make this information better for people. There's always something that you can do that's gonna make somebody else's life a lot easier."