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There is a particular kind of implementation day that starts with hope and ends with you staring into the middle distance, wondering how we got here. You have an “experienced supplier consultant” on the Teams call, billed at a £grand a day and up, and within ten minutes you realise the experience is mostly in filling out timesheets and saying “great question” while quietly avoiding the answer. They have often been parachuted in from the subs bench, often after being gently hoovered up from a customer who trained them as a super user, and now they arrive carrying one mental model of how SocialHousing works. One organisation, one configuration, one way of doing things, preserved forever like a fossil in amber. And because it worked at their old place, it must be universal. Like housing is a chain pub and every branch has the same menu, the same staff rota, and the same bloke in the corner who is always on his third pint of Guinness by 11:30.
What really sends my blood pressure north is the little phrase they wheel out when a client asks a perfectly sensible question about how the system behaves, how data flows, what the audit trail looks like, or what happens in the messy edge cases that happen every single day in real life. “Well you don’t really need to know about that.” Oh right. Cheers for that. I will just go back to running a regulated public service with vulnerable residents, governance, scrutiny, and a board that quite likes “knowing about that”, while you carry on pretending curiosity is a character flaw. It is a weird thing to say to people who have usually forgotten more about housing services than the consultant has ever learned. It is also a dead giveaway. It does not mean “you don’t need to know”. It means “I don’t know, and I’d like this conversation to stop before you notice.”
The bigger issue underneath it all is the sheer pride some suppliers seem to take in being siloed. You will meet someone implementing an integrated platform who proudly announces they “only do rent accounts” or “only do repairs, (just these non-DLO ones)” or “only do CRM scripts” as if they are a specialist surgeon. Except the whole selling point of an integrated system is that it is, you know, ‘integrated’. Housing does not arrive in neat little module-shaped parcels. A repair touches assets, compliance, contractor payments, tenant communications, satisfaction, sometimes safeguarding, and often a whole lot of reputational risk if it goes wrong. But somehow we are meant to accept that the person leading the work has no idea what happens when their bit of the system bumps into the next bit, like it is none of their business. For a thousand quid/euro a day, you would hope “none of my business” is not the core implementation methodology.
Then you get the repeated ritual of “I’ll take that away.” Now, to be fair, there is a proper version of that. Sometimes a question is complex, or it needs checking, or it depends on configuration choices. Fine. But there is another version where “I’ll take that away” is basically a substitute for knowing your own product. And when you have to “take it away” again and again, workshop after workshop, it stops being diligence and starts being theatre. The session loses momentum, decisions drift, the client loses confidence, and people start inventing workarounds because nobody can explain the real way the system behaves. The customer becomes the glue holding together a set of disconnected supplier specialists, and the customer is paying for the privilege. It is like hiring a plumber who can fit the taps but needs to “take away” any questions about pipes, water pressure, or whether your bathroom is actually connected to the rest of the house.
What makes it worse is the upside-down reward structure in supplier land. The person who survives implementations by deflecting questions and staying inside their tiny comfort zone can end up rewarded with a move into pre-sales or sales (Rolex incoming...), cheerfully presenting the whole suite like they designed it. Meanwhile the genuinely good consultants, the ones who learn the end-to-end flows, understand how housing actually works, and can join dots across modules without breaking into a sweat, are rarer than a quiet night out in the NQ4 Northern Quarter. Customers do not expect one human to know everything, but they do expect expertise proportionate to the day rate. If you are charging premium wonga and you are not even slightly embarrassed that you cannot answer basic questions about the system you are implementing, that is not just a knowledge gap. That is a culture problem.
And just to be clear, this is not about being nasty to individuals. People move jobs, people learn, and everyone starts somewhere. It is about the sheer normalisation of mediocrity, dressed up as “implementation experience”, and the way it wastes client time and project momentum. In social housing, you cannot wing it. We have complex tenures, care services, RSH regulatory pressure, scrutiny, tight budgets, and residents who pay the price when systems fail. A good implementer brings curiosity, humility, and enough badged product breadth to have an adult conversation about how things really work. They do not shut down questions, and they do not act like it is a badge of honour to only understand a tiny corner. If you are implementing an integrated system, you should be working to become integrated in your own knowledge too. Radical idea, I know but there you go, many do call me The SocialHousing ICT Critical Friend !
Related Post: So, how do we manage an on-time and effective go-live, for even the biggest projects?.
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.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, I Need To Know
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009
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