Believe That I Understand (my Repairs KPIs)

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/

Repairs is such a large area of expenditure and for most housing organisations, takes up over half of all calls and communications received. In these times of austerity, good analysis of repairs data can make the difference between surplus and deficiet for many. Demonstrating value for money and social value in your communities is also of importance.

So how should this be tackled? Do we understand our service? What do our residents, tenants and other 'customers' want from the repairs service? Do we understand our resources available to deliver our service? Are we adequately distinguishing responsive and planned expenditure. How do we design our KPI's to measure it all properly?

While housing organisations are all essentially providing similar themes in a repairs service, geography, type of resident or other factors will uniquely shape yours. Understanding schedule of rates and how these can be your friend in shaping how your repairs are reported, diagnosed and costed is crucial to managing your service. I have worked with organisations who are comfortable with operating with 3,000+ and paradoxically others who survive on just 60 'find fault and rectify' type items. Of course, there all shades in between. The latter follow a more 'John Seddon/Vanguard' approach, while the former might suit more an internal DLO type structure.

Neither extreme is right or wrong, nor the shades in between. However an understanding can help you make the most of your situation and assist in the design of the KPI's you need in shaping your own service. Over the past couple of decades, repairs have generally been graded by priority into Emergency, Urgent and Routine. Recent thinking questions this approach and many are now moving to more of an Emergency, plus the rest philosophy in terms of service. This can have benefits, but also put stress onto your resources.

Once measuring and generating KPIs, it is also important to benchmark against your peers and neighbours in the area, or your field of operation, to generate insight and to take advantage of good practice. For example, if your specialty is Care & Support, benchmark with other C&S providers.

Your KPI's need to be believable too, particularly measurements of satisfaction. How should you tackle this? There are many methods of collecting satisfaction. These range from traditional carding of customers after repairs completed, to automatic polling, manual polling using a call centre and increasingly partnering contractors measuring it, in order to satisfy bonus thresholds. Partnering often involves certain levels of trust, but can you really trust your contractors always hitting that 95% satisfaction KPI, which triggers bonus payments?

Presentation of your KPI's also need to be taloired to your target audience. This could be your own repairs staff or contractors, in order to drive improvements. In this case, exception reports might be the best medium. For your board, main stakeholders or external funders, more of a dashboard, is likely to hit the spot. There are plenty of fancy-pants products out there to present your KPIs in a neat set of dials and progress bars etc. However, smaller organisations can cope just as well using Excel.

A little bit of guidence is often all you need to set you on the right path. Thats why we have teamed up with those good eggs at the Rod Laird organisation, to present two courses to help with repairs KPI's and reporting this spring. To book in London or Manchester, follow this link http://www.rodlaird.co.uk/default.asp?page=1583  

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 : Drones in housing, dropping in near you soon?

Magazine - Believe That I Understand.


(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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I am the greatest

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/
 
Is your IT team ‘the greatest’ and do you give maximum satisfaction for expenditure per user? What price satisfaction then?

These are some of the things that the annual ‘HouseMark Information, Technology and Communication Benchmarking’ report aims to find out, by taking into account 144 housing organisations.

A little slimmer than previous years, the report suggests that RSL’s spend between £4K-6K on each ICT user, where LSVT’s appeared to mostly spend less. Notoriously, I have always wondered how accurate figures were, as I knew of organisations that deliberately submitted lower costs and others submitted very accurate figures and not surprisingly appeared in the lower quartile (higher cost section) of results.

One surprising conclusion is that costs did not seem to correlate to perceived satisfaction. Spending more on ITC does not appear to guarantee a better user experience or a more reliable system. I am unsure if many finance directors and managers will appreciate that outcome, as general up-time appears to be between 97-100%.

It would have been very useful to compare ICT costs across the six main housing management systems. This is not possible in this year’s report, but might well reflect where they have been used to create staff efficiencies.

A question I have been asked many times over the years, is “How many ICT staff do you think we should have?”. I am pleased to say that my usual finger in the air guess of one FTE (Full Time equivalent) post per 1,000 homes, is still a pretty good baseline. How does that compare for your team? IT staff remain stubbornly expensive at an average of over £41K, with ITC salaries in Yorkshire over £4K higher than in the North West of England. Maybe gods own county is not so frugal after all. 

Consolidation is often thought to reduce IT costs, this report suggests that smaller (perfectly formed) RSLs of under 5,000 homes appeared to perform better and cheaper on average. Of course the provision of many remote offices can push up costs.

Another interesting fact is that having a DLO appears to reduce ICT average costs, as well as saving your organisation 20% on your VATtable repairs.

The report highlights the current  ‘Digital by Default’ agenda as a driver for more web based resident portals and a drive to self service. From what I have seen recently, the drive to move Universal Credit and other current benefits online, is assisting take up of this type of channel shifting. As can be imagined, this reduces the cost of an enquiry or transaction from around £10, down to a mere fraction of that, providing enough customers move to use web portals.

It’s my view that tenants and customers still need a number of reasons to go to the HMS portals provided. This might well point to better integration with social media, local twitter feeds/Facebook/Google+ pages etc, to entice people in. Discount/reward schemes may also be a way to bring people in. A few RSLs to my knowledge have used social media very well in emergency situations, extreme weather, crime, lost children etc.

To help get residents on-line, a trend was identified to move old hardware into schemes that had exceeded its 3 year depreciation as a business tool. Thus the green box can be ticked and costs of disposal deferred or avoided. If your organisation is going down this route, do not overlook support provision, or that this older gear will be more prone to breakdown.

Download the full report for bedtime reading at: http://www.housemark.co.uk/hmresour.nsf/lookup/HM_ITC_BM_rpt_2013.pdf/$File/HM_ITC_BM_rpt_2013.pdf

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 !

A House - I Am The greatest.


(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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