publish-pathway-reflections-post (#446)

Author: veroje

app/breast-screening-pathway/2026/03/reflections-on-forecasting-and-planning-discovery/index.md

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+---
+title: Reflections on forecasting and planning discovery
+description: What worked well and what we would do differently to help future discovery teams
+date: 2026-03-31
+author: Veronika Jermolina
+opengraphImage:
+  src: /breast-screening-pathway/2026/03/breast-screening-in-mobile-vans/retro.png
+  alt: Some of the retro comments
+tags:
+  - discovery
+  - retro
+---
+
+We started building the new breast screening service by focusing on participants attending appointments, having mammograms and receiving results. We had no understanding of the parts of the service that preceded what we started building.  
+
+To address this gap, in December 2025 we formed a discovery team to understand how breast screening offices (BSOs) forecast demand and plan capacity. The team consisted of a selection of people in different roles already working on breast screening.  
+
+We ran a retrospective in February 2026 to reflect on what worked well and what we would do differently to help future discovery teams.  
+
+## What went well
+
+### Policy and digital working together
+
+Policy is a set of rules that shapes key parts of the service, from how participants are selected for screening to what data is collected. Historically, the national policy team, responsible for policy, and the digital team, responsible for IT implementation, worked separately, with limited trust between them. 
+
+A significant outcome of this discovery was that the two teams started working more closely together, building shared understanding for the first time. 
+
+### Self-organising to visit breast screening offices
+
+To ensure we included a wide range of BSOs in the discovery, we needed to visit geographically dispersed locations in a short time. The team did this by organising itself into small multi-disciplinary groups of up to 3 people with clear responsibilities: leading the visit, note taking and observing.
+
+Because we are based across the country, this reduced travel time and costs. It allowed people with different job roles to learn directly from frontline users and meant the team was learning together.  
+
+Self-organising in this way helped us form new working relationships quickly, learn different working styles and support each other.
+
+### Building a shared understanding of the problem space
+
+We took detailed notes of the BSO visits and then worked through those in synthesis sessions. This helped us build a shared understanding across all the BSOs without each team member visiting every location. 
+
+We created a clear picture of [how BSOs approach planning](../what-bsos-told-us-about-forecasting-and-planning/), where current systems fall short and where the new delivery team could focus their efforts.
+
+## What we’d do differently
+
+### Adapt and share as you learn
+
+Forecasting and planning within BSOs is a complex area. In hindsight, our scope may have been too ambitious as we were trying to do 2 things:  
+
+* give the delivery team a clear focus  
+
+* understand the full complexity of forecasting from the perspectives of BSOs, commissioners, policy and quality assurance 
+
+Building in clear reflection points about our scope, our roles and what we were learning would have helped us adapt and welcome feedback that could have helped us see things sooner.
+
+### Do less, with more impact
+
+The discovery produced more than the new team could immediately use. Only a fraction of the work was timely for them (the findings around creating clinics and setting up appointments).  
+
+Building in pauses to reflect would have allowed us to recognise that we had enough high-level understanding and redirect effort to the more granular questions.
+
+### Design the ending and the transition
+
+As the new delivery team was forming towards the end of the discovery, we felt pulled in several directions: 
+
+* supporting the new team 
+
+* giving answers to our stakeholders and sponsors 
+
+* synthesising a large amount of research 
+
+We should have considered the different audience needs earlier and designed the end of the discovery as a transition to the delivery team.
+
+### Closing thoughts 
+
+Sometimes the most important discovery outcomes are the ones you don't anticipate.  
+
+We hope this hindsight helps other teams and their sponsors run better discoveries and leave room for the unexpected.