We’re finalists in three categories at this years Housing Technology Awards: digital transformation, innovation and data management. We’re taking the opportunity to take a deep dive into what we’ve been up to and why we’re being recognised.
For the digital transformation award we’ve been nominated for our proof-of-concept uniting people and data. John Carey, head of procurement, explains what we’ve done:
The social housing sector faces many challenges, grappling with a range of significant external pressures. These pressures continue to weaken the sector’s financial capacity and put pressure on business plans. Against this very challenging backdrop, the sector is making record investment in existing homes to meet quality and building safety commitments, net zero targets, as well as building much needed new homes.
In order to meet these challenges, as well as provide quality services that meet the expectations of our residents and other stakeholders, our colleagues need to have the right contract management skills and knowledge to perform their roles effectively.
At Notting Hill Genesis we employed a new perspective to address this persistent challenge. Working in partnership with two innovative providers, 4OC and its partner Morphologic, we developed a contract management programme supporting the focus on embedding a performance-driven culture and becoming a more customer-centric organisation.
To improve the quality and consistency of the contract management of our services, as well as the satisfaction of our colleagues and residents, we worked with 4OC to create a solution using Morphologic, a software tool that allows users to create applications and workflows without writing any code, using drag-and-drop features and pre-built templates, offering features that included:
- A web app builder that allowed us to publish the dashboards as web apps that could be accessed and shared by the staff and managers, using any device and browser.
- Anonymous survey functionality combined with role-based access to data within the app.
- A dashboard builder that allowed the organisation to create interactive and visual dashboards to display the training needs results and recommendations, using various dynamic charts, to enable accessible analysis.
- A data analysis feature that allowed advanced and automated analysis on the training needs data, using various methods, such as descriptive statistics, correlation, clustering, and machine learning.
We decided to design and build a custom-made, comprehensive training needs analysis, to identify the gaps and priorities in skills and knowledge – baselining the current state to ensure progress could be tracked, and to design a tailored and flexible training plan for each of the three levels of contract manager (foundation, practitioner, and expert).
Alongside ensuring rigour and compliance in the project, a robust evaluation method was agreed, enabled by Morphologic. An important factor in the design, build, test, and rapid improvements in the solution, was the focus on evidencing the link between improved skills and resident satisfaction. The application was designed so that data could be collected from multiple sources to enable system-wide insight.
Using this new technology allowed colleagues with strong operational knowledge and skills to actually build the software they needed. With 4OC experts in the subject matter leading the design of the assessment, evaluation and the training collateral, a multi-disciplinary team was established for the project, bringing people without ‘data’ in their job title closer to the intelligence they needed. In just a few hours of work, the team designed and built a complex training needs analysis tool, focused on three proficiency levels of contract management.
The solution has facilitated the ongoing tracking of progress – not only in evaluating knowledge and skills metrics but also using the app to work with colleagues on action learning sets, enabling the recording of actionable training plans and progress notes with a personal dashboard, all in their own digital environment.
Initial results show an increase in skills and capability of 40% in just a short timeframe, which is expected to increase as these are embedded in the organisation and the training is rolled out more widely. It is expected that this increase in skills and capability will translate into increased contract performance and higher resident satisfaction.
