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Typical Engagement Flow

Many people ask about what a typical engagement with the RAP team at NHS England looks like. Since every team is different and since the service is still in a formative state, there really is no typical engagement.

Nevertheless, the text below lays out the type of activities that occur in across the engagement. The approach described is the support model where the RAP team leads the development as this is our most frequent approach.

Please note that a direct engagement with the RAP team at NHS England is currently only available to NHS England teams. The below is intended to help other organisations that may be developing their own RAP capabilities and are looking for guidance.

⚠ Making a RAP takes significant resources, and time. Make sure that you read through the RAP Readiness Checklist before embarking on building yours.

Initial Impressions

  • Hear about RAP through show-and-tells, internal advertising, slack, etc.
  • Have a look over the RAP Community of Practice pages to get a sense of what it is all about.
  • Reach out to the RAP Community of Practice for a chat
  • Together with someone from the RAP team, walk through the levels of RAP page and consider the team's scale of ambition.
  • If you are keen to proceed, pass the request to the RAP product owner for prioritisation and resourcing
  • Get a start date in the calendar. Think about publication timing, team capacity, etc. to choose a good time.

Setting the foundation

  • Team lead goes through the Rap Readiness checklist
  • Team identifies that they have the requisite resources in place. They pay particular attention to the time requirements identified in the RAP Readiness Checklist
  • Identify a publication/product that needs taking through RAP process
  • Identify people in the publication team who will learn RAP process (PO and min 2 analysts)
  • Identify people in the RAP team, or those familiar with RAP practices, to support the publication team through RAP transition
  • Set up a Jira board for tracking work and confluence space for documenting learning, agreed decisions
  • Teams meet and ice breaker session to get to know each other. Set out the plan for the engagement, review roles and responsibilities, lessons learned from previous projects, etc.
  • Team agree an end-point for the project (i.e., silver RAP).

Getting stuck in

  • Pair up analysts from publication and RAP teams. These coding buddies will work collaboratively for the rest of the project.
  • Identify the 'thin slice' of the publication that we will aim to replicate in the first phase.
  • Identify training needs of the publication team through conversations

  • Dedicated training. The content is tailored to the specific team but a typical sequence might look like:

  • Concept of a thin slice and how to choose the thin slice

  • Access to off-the-shelf interactive training for self-led training
  • PySpark style guide
  • Version control
  • Writing good functions

  • Unit tests

  • Buddy pairs work to replicate the thin slide outputs

  • Set up automated code testing once the numbers are correct
  • Group code review of buddy pair code as a learning exercise
  • Decide how to structure code for publication as a whole
  • Portion out the rest of the publication to be replicated i.e. geographical breakdowns
  • Each analyst takes a portion at a time working independently to produce using RAP standards seeking buddy support as needed
  • Set up QA and RS checks pre-publication

Being transparent

  • Publish code on github
  • Add a link to the code repository in the publication and a link to the publication in the code repository
  • Show and tell on what we have learned, documents added to github

Close-down

  • Review the codebase to confirm that all the elements of baseline RAP (or silver/gold) have been met.
  • Reflect on the resources and materials available throughout the process and suggest improvements or additions.
  • Do a user-research session with the RAP team to suggest improvements to the service for those who come later.
  • Take some time to reflect on the process internally as a team and consider how you plan to take forward the work.
Last update: November 11, 2024
External Links Disclaimer

NHS England makes every effort to ensure that external links are accurate, up to date and relevant, however we cannot take responsibility for pages maintained by external providers.

NHS England is not affiliated with any of the websites or companies in the links to external websites.

If you come across any external links that do not work, we would be grateful if you could report them by raising an issue on our RAP Community of Practice GitHub.