Service Owner - #1663958

Digital Service and Product Leadership in NHS Wales

We’re looking for 2 x Service Owners to join the Primary Care, Community and Mental Health directorate in DHCW – the digital delivery organisation of NHS Wales.

We are seeking proactive and strategic Service Owners to lead the design, delivery, and continuous improvement of digital NHS services in two key areas – Vaccines and Primary Care (Pharmacy, Dental and Optometry).

As a key role in the organisation, you will be responsible for ensuring our services meet the needs of users, including clinicians, staff and data teams, while driving efficiency and innovation. You will be responsible for the quality of your service and oversee the end-to-end service lifecycle, aligning technology, operations, process and policy to enhance patient outcomes and service performance.

If you have a passion for improving healthcare services and the product expertise to drive transformation in the NHS, we would love to hear from you.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Leading product teams – Adopt a portfolio view, managing end-to-end services that include multiple products and channels.

• Representing your service – Communicate the benefits and performance of your service and be responsible for its successful operation and continuous improvement.
• Working with senior stakeholders - Representing your service with organisation-wide, NHS Exec and Senior Stakeholders, using information from diverse user, commercial and service sources
• Mentoring & advising – Acting as a point of expertise for the team, helping others build their product and service skills.
• Building the Service Owner community – Sharing knowledge and best practices, advocating for best practice service owner skills across the organisation.

The Service Owner is a strategic yet hands on role, overseeing multiple product teams to ensure those products meet the needs of users. You will create and communicate a compelling service vision and roadmap ensuring the right balance of meeting business/user objectives and managing technical risk.

As an expert in product management and user centred design, you'll provide digital leadership, introducing and embedding embed digital culture and skills with your teams, and ensuring your products perform well.

You'll contribute to a Service Owner Community of Practice, mentoring and upskilling team members while standardising best practices. Collaborating with design teams, agile delivery managers, developers, testers and product teams, you'll develop high performing products and services that deliver for user need.

Key responsibilities include developing a long-term vision, strategic plan and objectives, developing agile business cases, coaching and leading teams in agile and lean practices, communicating confidently with senior stakeholders.

As Service Owner, you will take a hands-on yet strategic role in leading, developing and running your service. You will provide product and service leadership, acting as a subject matter expert on product management, user-centred design and digital leadership. Working closely with your product teams, you will embed and develop the digital service standard, to ensure high-quality digital healthcare solutions in Wales. You will develop the vision for your service, own the roadmap, lead the teams, engage with senior stakeholders in Welsh Government and the NHS Executive.

You will also mentor and support team members, build product management skills, and contribute to a community of practice that enhances service ownership within DHCW.

The ability to speak Welsh is desirable for this post; English and/or Welsh speakers are equally welcome to apply.

What we are looking for:

Qualifications and/or Knowledge

Essential criteria:

• Educated to Master’s degree or equivalent in associated professional field
• Evidence of continuing professional development
• Expert knowledge and experience of Service Ownership and Product Management in an IT/digital environment; managing large and complex services
• Expert knowledge and experience of the Agile tools and techniques to deliver large-scale programmes, services, and products, as well as financial, legal, and technical issues related to delivering at scale.
• Detailed knowledge and understanding of complex/ transformational change and of change management theory and processes

Desirable criteria:

• Welsh Language Skills are desirable level 1, or above, in understanding, speaking, reading, and writing in Welsh.
• Specialist Knowledge of NHS and or local authority policies, strategies, and governance processes.
• Specialist Knowledge of NHS or other public sector planning, capital, and management processes.

Experience:

Essential criteria:

• Delivering high quality digital products and services that meet the service standards and are best in class for meeting users’ raised expectations of technology whilst taking responsibility for legacy technology in the service area, and tackling the risks associated with it
• Substantial experience of managing / leading teams to deliver project objectives on-time and on-budget
• Creating and communicating a compelling service vision and roadmap ensuring the right balance of meeting business/user objectives and managing technical risk
• Representing a service area to board-level officials and senior stakeholders, using information from diverse user, commercial and service sources.
• Embedding digital culture with your stakeholders, the organisation, and the wider NHS Wales
• Experience of dealing with major IT private sector providers in delivering major IT projects and solutions

Skills and attributes:

Essential criteria:

• Outcome-focused - balancing the needs of competing stakeholders, with a highly developed sense of customer awareness, ensuring that services are valuable and effective for the organisation.
• Excellent communication skills and interpersonal skills, when dealing with highly complex and sensitive information to a wide range of stakeholders across organisational boundaries, and excellent presentation, negotiation, and facilitation skills.
• Adept at finding ways of solving or pre-empting problems
• Excellent organisational, judgement, analysis, and decision-making skills on extremely complicated problems
• Able to operate effectively in a changing environment.
• Leadership and development of high performing multidisciplinary teams that use service design and user-centred, data-driven, cloud based delivery practices.