Delivering Microsoft 365 and Power Platform skills for 1,500 employees across 200 NHS organisations
The Microsoft 365 suite of productivity, collaboration, and cloud-based services are designed to enhance productivity, communication, and collaboration for individuals and businesses.
Closely integrated with Microsoft 365, The Microsoft Power Platform suite empowers users to analyse data, build solutions, automate processes, and create virtual agents.
When utilised, these suites unlock the opportunity for critical business productivity and collaboration across an entire organisation.
The challenge
To ensure NHS technical teams and frontline workers had the skills needed to maximise the investment of the suite, Microsoft solicited their training partners here at QA to deliver a series of skilling events to align platform capabilities with the following 3 NHS business initiatives:
- Accelerate app creativity to inspire the NHS to adopt Microsoft Teams to be installed on personal devices.
- Support the NHS “Data Saves Lives” policy to provide crucial Data Skills to utilise data records of 65m+ UK citizens.
- Enable NHS users to build Power Apps by upskilling key users on low-code app building and methodology.
The solution
In collaboration with Microsoft and NHS England stakeholders, QA applied a 5-stage delivery process consisting of:
- Discovery – Identify key business challenges and audience
- Goals – Define programme success metrics attached to identified business goals
- Audit – Identify skills gaps based on audience segmentation and market analysis
- Planning – Define learning outcomes, skills required and skills targets
- Delivery – Tailored training to NHS business needs
Within the project discovery phase, QA worked with relevant Microsoft and NHS England stakeholders to understand the scope of the challenge and the key NHS audiences to be trained. This resulted in an agreed a project delivery plan, incorporating over 70 events scheduled over 7 months between June and December 2024. This included training on:
- Dashboard in a day: Workshopping Power BI Reports and Dashboards for NHS
- Governance and Enablement Workshop for NHS
- Low Code Vision Workshop for NHS
- M365 Accessibility and Sustainability for NHS
- M365 Device and Endpoint Management for NHS
- Mastering Microsoft Teams Voice for NHS
- Mastering Security, Compliance, Governance in M365 for NHS
- Microsoft 365 Certified: Teams Administrator Associate
- Microsoft 365 Fundamentals
- Microsoft Certified: Power Platform App Maker Associate
- Microsoft Certified: Power Platform Fundamentals
- Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst
- Microsoft Power Platform Solution Architect
- Microsoft Teams: A tailored Webinar for NHS Teams Users
- Power Apps Workshop for NHS
- Power BI: A tailored Webinar for NHS PBI User
Bespoke training was created for NHS England by QA, featuring internal roadmaps and mock patient data in course demos and hands-on labs. By enabling learners to visualise relevant NHS data within their training, teams were able to efficiently and effectively apply their learning back into the workplace with job role relevancy at both pace and scale.
For example, by understanding the Microsoft 365 service implementation was managed by a third-party provider, QA were able to tailor demos and course lab interfaces to match the NHS user tenancy requirement enabling learners to focus on real-world examples.
Similarly, Power BI training was tailored for NHS England by featuring internal roadmaps and mock patient data in course demos and hands-on labs.
By enabling learners to visualise relevant NHS data within their training, teams were able to efficiently and effectively apply their learning back into the workplace with job role relevancy at both pace and scale.
The result
By maximising the Microsoft 365 investment and data visualisation, the NHS were able to target specific audiences for training events and produce monthly reports on insights that were previously unidentified.
Over the 7-month training period:
- 1,500+ NHS employees were upskilled across over 230 NHS organisations
- Critical data skills were delivered to innovate and utilise data records of 65m+ UK citizens
- An overall learner satisfaction score of 9 out of 10 was achieved – including:
- How likely would you be to recommend the training? 8.5 out of 10
- Training will improve my job performance 8.6 out of 10
- Instructor was knowledgeable 9.3 out of 10
Through learner interviews, participants feed back indicated the value of the training in relation to their varied roles across NHS England:
“Very comprehensive, very knowledgeable and great at showing handy tips and tricks as well as showing the best practice ways or 'long-winded' ways to help explain where and how things happen in the software, overall a great interactive experience.”
“Provides useful insight on the accessibility needs and considerations when producing documents for others.”
“Amazing, so inciteful and really helpful. This will make my job so much easier and improve the quality and level of reporting I produce.”
When asked for feedback on QA instructors, NHS learners told QA:
“Very knowledgeable instructor, provided meaningful insights and linked these to all the contents covered. Also provided very useful links for further personal study.”
“One of the best instructors I've come across, he was concise, made the instructions easy to understand and follow, patient, knowledgeable and presented at the right pace.”
Chris Brierley-Roberts, Senior Training Manager, Microsoft Worldwide Learning commented, “QA have been fantastic to work with in delivering this project. Their long-standing pedigree as a leading Microsoft Solutions Partner for Training Services coupled with their extensive experience of delivering training solutions to the NHS really underpinned the whole programme effort. They have been incredibly thorough throughout the project planning phase through to the quality of the training delivery, genuinely going that extra mile to make the programme to make a huge success. It has been a real partnership.”