With over 2 decades of working for, with and on behalf of the social housing sector, we are in a unique position to offer a range of services to support your organisation and ensure you are getting the best out of your systems
You have made a massive investment in your housing management solutions; not just in financial terms but also in respect of time for both the set up and operational teams, as well as personal and organisational reputation , staff training and retention and ultimately the level of service that you provide to your tenants and other service users. How do you get assurance that you are following best practice, leveraging the functionality that is available and ensuring you get value for money from both the system and the teams it is supporting. One way is a with a Critical Friend Review.
We will come into your organisation and at whatever level you request, review the options that are configured, integrations available and bolt on automations that can be made available and advise where there are benefits to be gained or risks that can be mitigated. The scope of this can be wide or narrow as you require; focussing either on one business department, or (in our experience) more effective looking at a single business process end-to-end, cutting across functional departments.
A Critical Friend has no allegience to any one supplier or department, but has the holisitc interests of the organisation at heart and this requires both a deep technical understanding of how the systems work, but also the strategic and emotional maturity to navigate the policts of introducing change into the organisation that may affect the real or perceived power base of long-standing or highly regarded members of the team. With no 'axe to grind'; they are often the one person who can wield the necessary influence without being second-guessed as to their motives.
Our exposure to so many implementations across different sized organisations and core system combinations gives us a unique insight into high-risk and problem areas, along with a wealth of pre-configured analysis tools, we can unlock critical (Governance, financial, GDPR, Legal) risks quickly and provide a suite of solutions that will mitigate and then eliminate the risk through a combination of configuration, automation, reporting and process redesign that will both protect revenue and reputation as well as provide a higher level of confidence in the existing system and surrounding operating paradigms.
System upgrades are always a scary time for any housing provider; With our experience, you can use our templated test scripts and scenarios to get a leg-up on what areas of the system present the biggest risk and will take the most time and resources to complete. No one likes doing UAT and your team still need to do the day job, so ensuring that testing time achieves maximum utilisation is a key factor on ensuring the success of the test programme and ultimately the upgrade to the system.
As well as providing the Project Overwatch data quality framework, all organisations that are affiliated to the system become VIP members of the Overwatch Club where we encourage members to share any findings they have about their core systems, solutions to DQ issues identified and provide a marketplace to exchange ideas reports and automation solutions that can benefit all members of the club. The idea is that all boats float on a rising tide and we can make a bigger impact if the work we have done can be leveraged across multiple providers and help to establish best practices across the user base of a partiular product or the sector as a whole
The OC is an online forum; we also have regular video round-table discussions that are made available to the OC OGs and we hope to have regular regional in-person meetups to demonstrate best practice techniques and form a collegiate respons to DQ and regulatory challenges faced by the industry. When a channel is big enough we will set it up independently based on application (HMS/Finance system) and/or function.
Active-H from MIS has one of the most powerful addon features in it's workflow hooks. These essentially allow you to intercept system actions and provide additional functionality to automate processes. Although powerful, the technology is proprietary and not particularly intuitive to learn.
We have vast experience in developing workflows in both Legacy and Modern workflows (similar conceptually, but completely different technology under the hood). Our workflows are performant, self documenting, track executions and dependencies and allow for config based deployment to meet CAB (Change Approval Board) requirements. In addition to writing the workflows we have a number of analysis tools that can help you to review the existing workflow deployment environment and identify issues where outdated workflows are still being called and where there are duplications of workflows that need to be retargeted.