When The Levee Breaks

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


I have been involved with enough implementation projects of various sizes, to have seen no end of risk and issue registers. Some RAID logs are but a few lines, others in tens of megabytes and looking more like Tolstoy’s War & Peace. They come in all shapes and sizes and all projects should clearly have one.

I have often seen people reluctant to add ‘Weather’, ‘Earthquake’ or ‘Bushfire’ on their risk registers, although I understand ones down under come Pre-printed with the latter these days. Climate is becoming more unpredictable, whatever your belief in man-made climate change.

The last big historic project related weather event I remember was in Jan 2010. There was serious snow, below zero temperatures and disruption. The weather prevented locals getting to a meeting in Blandford, Dorset when I had made it with colleagues from the North West. Apparently Dorset only had one snowplough. Who knew?

So lets face it, weather related risks used to be very unlikely. Well I think no more.

Last month over at a client where I am working as a Critical Friend, for a large integrated housing and contractor system project, I came face to face with how climate change, can affect a project. For the second time this year, (firstly Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire), floods of an almost biblical proportion, have stopped us in our tracks.

The severe South Yorkshire floods in Doncaster and Sheffield looked horrendous on the news. I for one would have preferred to see it classified as an emergency sooner, particularly having worked with the fabulous people up there at St Leger Homes and Doncaster MBC, over the last year or so. Brilliant down to earth folk. I always thought when watching the footage, that many in our project team, would be dragged off to assist. I wasn’t wrong.

While my heart goes out to the 80 or so families evacuated from the terrible floods, three weeks of many staff across the organisations, needing to be involved in a ‘Silver Alert’, takes its toll on a complex system and ICT transformation project. A few weeks of cancelled implementation and configuration sessions, leave a big gap, which is difficult to easily mitigate. Forward sessions in the project plan cannot go ahead, as previous config and preparation has not been completed.

This causes issues internally at the client and at supplier(s). Most suppliers try to allocate resources at least six weeks ahead, so cancelling sessions can mean a five week or more wait to reschedule. This often surprises clients, who often I hear say, “I was hoping for next week”!   When I was an implementer that’s how it generally was and also these days when organising consultancy days. It should not be a surprise, to anyone involved in a project. At St Leger Homes, we are still on track for our target go-live, although I for one will be keeping out a weather eye going forward.

So, my Takeaway (or Carryout for readers in Scotland), is to plan more seriously around the risk of weather related disruption, regardless of how you feel about the cause or evidence of human caused Climate Change.

Related Post: Are some of your transformation and ICT projects taking far too long, or never coming to completion 🤔?  
 

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.

Jeff Buckley- When The Levee Breaks.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here

Could we help you or your organisation? Our contact details are here , get in touch we will be pleased to chat about your problems and help with your organisation issues.
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. . . . . . . . . . .

Your Call - So Good

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/


A big deserved thank you for OmFax and St Leger Homes in Doncaster, for inviting me to host the 'YourCall' event last week. I always enjoy meeting and chatting to the incredible staff and managers, delivering excellent customer services in the social housing sector.


This 'Your Call' event was a cracker, really interesting with some varied opinions, starting straight after the breakfast pastries and coffee. The event was attended by a great group, including from St Leger (natch!), A1 Housing in Worksop, Astraline (who provide out of hours services), Berneslai Homes  in Barnsley, WDH in Wakefield, Newark & Sherwood and Ongo in Scunthorpe.

First up after the stats from the 'Your Call' survey was revealed, ( you can still register your thoughts via the link on http://tonysmiththathousingitguy.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/say-something-about-state-of-social.html ), was a discussion on the diversification of channels. Everyone these days want to channel shift, offer cheaper 24/7 service online. But what does it mean for the traditional customer service team?

Well Twitter and social media raised its head, increasingly a method that customers are using to contact & express opinions about the social landlords in the group. For some just a 9to5 Twitter prescience was enough. Most were all experiencing some levels of added commercialisation and some were experiencing group expansion. These brought their own challenges and the creation of waste in the customer service centre. Often it was in-complete integration  that created problems. That old chestnut, data not held in a single place, presenting information to customer service staff.

One other issue cited was incomplete channel shift or a partial implementation that actually doubled up tasks. Examples are when a website form can be completed at any time 24/7, but arrives as an email, for customer services to key into another system, the following morning. I recalled my experience of the Halifax online bank 'IF' from 1999, doing just that. Spookily enough, one of the attendees still had an 'IF' (Intelligent Finance) account. I bet the Halifax have managed to integrate it all properly by now!

On the subject of personalisation of service, all agreed that one of the tricks was to recruit for attitude not knowledge. One RSL tried its best to recruit staff from its resident bodies. An absolutely brilliant idea. The better integrated systems seemed to make it easier to personalise. often a CRM module was badly synchronised with back-end housing systems. This can lead to duplicate contacts, data spread across many places or completely missing in action sometimes.

To empower staff to be able to deliver expert service, some attendees utilised work shadowing, to see the effect on other staff. Seeing the process as a long customer journey was seen as useful and had informed front & back-end staff as to the importance of each step as being part of delivering excellence. Failures generate waste calls and small changes, such as automated texts and keeping customers/tenants informed, can significantly reduce waste.       

So, all in all a very interesting morning indeed. I hope Peter Graddon & Omfax will be continuing the 'Your Call' idea into the future. A great way to exchange great ideas, issues and best practice.

Related Post: Does Mobile or Channel Shift often mean doing everything twice?

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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.


Joy Zipper - You're So Good.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


Access a quick list of our Social Housing ICT blog posts here
Could we help you or your organisation? Our contact details are here , get in touch we will be pleased to chat about your problems and help with your organisation issues.
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