Week 112: The right people in the right order

Posted by: Frankie Roberto
Published: 4 October 2026

Having created a prototype for getting a test in the NHS App last week, this week was largely about showing it to other teams and discussing what next.

One of the challenges of a team like ours, which doesn’t have direct responsibility for any individual service but instead looks to better join them up, is that our work is dependent upon many other teams, and they might understandably feel like we’re stepping on their toes.

To avoid this, it’s essential that we talk to the right people, and in the right order. This isn’t easy. Some teams might be super busy with upcoming deadlines, and their delivery managers or deputy directors would rather we come to them first before asking detailed questions of their designers and engineers. For other teams, this may come across as heavy-handed, and initial peer-to-peer conversations at designer or engineer level may be more appropriate. And to make things more complicated, where we’re proposing changes for both service teams and App teams, we have to work out who to persuade first.

This kind of co-ordination problem isn’t unique to us, and probably afflicts all large organisations of any complexity – and I guess the usual response is a layer of middle management and process (which we have plenty of too).

My usual philosophy is to embrace the idea of organisations being more like chaotic networks with semi-random connections between people and teams, and where relationships are often more important than hierarchy.

In theory we can reduce some of the overhead by encouraging teams to be open about their work, in show-and-tells, weeknotes, Confluence pages and Sharepoint sites, design history posts and product documentation sites. But you can’t expect everyone to watch and read all of these, and discovering them is its own challenge, so they can act more like happenstance encounters. But still useful in being able to save many a meeting by sending a link instead.

On my team, I’m grateful that Rose, Ralph and Emily take on the bulk of the work of meeting the right people in the right order, making friends and influencing people.

But we won’t and can’t always get it right. So we have to accept that our team’s role means we’ll sometimes annoy other teams by mistake, and all we can do is apologise and make amends.

And in the meantime I’ll continue doing my part, which includes writing these weeknotes and being as open as I can.

Links