Have You Been To The English Deerpark?

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy
or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy

 
Has anyone reading this been to the ‘English Deer Park’?

Music fans of ‘The Fall’ and ‘Mark E Smith’ (RIP), will probably have some lyrics spinning around their heads already hopefully, having read that line!

A suitable description for a session I will be doing at the first afternoon of the ‘Housing Technology 2019 Conference & Executive Forum’.

Close to where I live, there’s a couple of large ones run or under ownership by the National Trust. They do a pretty good job and they are two big patches of wooded spaces, relaxing to walk in or take the little ones out to. Well worth the four quid to park and the £4.50 for a clotted cream & jam scone, once you have exited by the gift-shoppe and slid into the café.

Now, I am not planning to running to use bribes of scones and clotted cream to entice attendees to my session, or indeed do it all in rhyme. The latter was done extremely well last year and pretty much can’t be topped IMHO.

My deer park thoughts take me to the autumn. A season, generally October time, when the deer generally rut. What could be better than watching some of our largest mammals as the stags lock antlers in a head-to-head battle?

What about maybe watching one or more of our big beast solution suppliers, grapple with integration, like rutting stags, on different projects, at various times, right around the year? It can be done, and I don’t generally need my Zeiss Victory RF binoculars, to witness it up close. 

Who would think that in 2019, decent integration would pose anything other than a slight configuration issue. In fairness, I see a lot of solutions that were never sufficiently integrated, many with no evidence prior that those combinations of applications, ever would. Poor integration leads to manual workarounds, that often become the established process.

Hardly anywhere worse than this to be an issue, is self-service. Which lets be clear, is something just about everyone is rushing to try to do well these days. Integration problems need to be cracked and often failure to do so efficiently, will seriously affect the quality of that.

My Housing Technology session aims to cover this issue and try to provide a number of useful takeaways, to help manage those ‘rutting’ suppliers, particularly when looking to crack self-service.

It would be great to see you there. 

If you haven’t booked already, have a look on this link - https://www.housing-technology.com/events/htc19/

Click here to register

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This year it is the 10th annual event, is now the leading and longest-running technology event for senior IT and business decision-makers in the UK socialhousing sector. Again, this event brings together so many influential practitioners and suppliers in one place. I hope I will see you there. Say hi, lets share a beer.  

Related Post: Are your residents the best eye & ears of all?   

Catch the blog monthly archive at https://soundcloud.com/housingitguy/

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I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.

The Fall – Deerpark.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


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Learn To Fly

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @hotpixUK

or LinkedIn here uk.linkedin.com/pub/tony-smith-bsc-hons-acih/a/979/351/

It didn't have a runway, but the Belfry hotel just outside Oxford, was the ideal place to learn to fly. If you are involved with social housing that is. I was pleased to get down to the fifth Housing Technology Conference last week, put together by George Grant and the Intelligent Business Company. As usual, the venue was a great choice (if a little of a labyrinth). Even my housing friends and customers from the south east found getting there an easier job than getting into central London. Maybe the NHF should (at last) take note and consider locating out of the capital and Olympia, for coming November IT Manager events. All credit to George, keep up the good work! He even fed the suppliers, something that does not always happen for autumn in West London.

Many thanks too, everyone who stopped me for a chat, great to hear how projects are going and some of the frustrations out there. Integration (or lack of it), inflexibility of applications or suppliers, limitations of project teams/staff, procurement hassles and some shrinking IT budgets, were all the same current issues that housing ICT people chatted with me about.  As usual, feel free to contact me to bounce any details off me.

It was good to see such a variety of presentations, although welfare reform was a recurrent theme. Essential and at times very thought provoking. George Clarke, C4's 'Desperation' man was an inspired choice for opener. We certainly need more positive and refreshing voices like his. It also brought back some of my caravan nightmares from my youth. I still have not been back to Lowestoft to this day (honest!). So much to mention, I will try to focus on what I found interesting and innovative.

Richard Scholes of Hyde had some interesting points to make. One about the outcome of his competitive (comm's project) dialogue, struck a chord with me. Just getting down to a single supplier can have its benefits. Hyde managed to shave nearly a 1/3 from its previous costs. Maybe time spent on CD can always deliver some kind of payback. His internal staff assessment using a panel, was also a clear and fair way of improving the quality of his ICT team. I was nodding and smiling too with his approach of embedding his ICT staff with users and business teams. The perfect way for everyone to interact and understand everyone's pressures. 

Jonathan Creaser of RHP gave a great overview with Tracey Elliott of their progress in supporting multi-channel nudging. Everywhere I go to do consultancy these days, want to channel shift well. RHP seem to really be on top of the game here, even being brave enough to persuade the 'silver surfers' to get online. Full marks to Tracey for answering my questions regarding that truthfully. Not something to be glossed over, digital exclusion. Moreover, an area we need to help and nudge our communities.

One of the most interesting sessions came from Accent Group and The Housing Contact Company. How & why is customer satisfaction important in 2014. In this presentation John Doyle of Housing Contact drew on his experience of gathering customer feedback across a number of industries to question the relevance of speaking to your customers in 2014. Through his unlikely comparison of social housing and the UK automotive retail market he made the point that measuring customer satisfaction whatever your sector, has probably never been as important as a process for organisational improvement.

He noted that although most organisations understand how they go about measuring satisfaction, very few of them really understand why they do it. It had echoes of John Seddon and his Vanguard method. Understand how to measure the outcome, dont just blindly play to the KPIs in use.
John's whole philosophy is to try and speak to everyone to whom you have delivered a service as soon as possible after the event and then to use your dissatisfied customers to tell you what is wrong with your operation. This fairly radical approach was given weight by the testimonial provided by Andrew Kidds of the Accent Group, who has used the service for over 2 years and seen real satisfaction levels improve – ie based on around 33% customer responses taken on the same day or day after as opposed to less than 10% response rates taken weeks later.

At the same time the level of complaints have dropped significantly and last year alone Accent were able to identify and resolve dissatisfaction issues with over 1500 of their tenants. This all ploughs back into an improved customer journey and overall lower numbers of waste and avoidable calls, greater efficiencies.

The examples I have selected from just a few of the presentations, show the quality of what we had here. Take some of these lessons and stories, learn to make your organisation fly. Less suppliers banging on about how brilliant their solutions are and more practical experiences from RSLs. Let's have more of these George, keep them coming!

You can link with me on LinkedIn here - uk.linkedin.com/pub/tony-smith-bsc-hons-acih/a/979/351/ It would be great to connect !

Read on to: Autumn, the conference season. Great time to see what's out there and working.

Foo Fighters - Learn To Fly .


(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009

PS As usual, if there are subjects you might like me to tackle on this blog, please get in touch and let me know!

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