We caught up with Scott Markham, Director of Transformation and Change, to talk us through what is L&Q’s Transformation Programme and what this means to our organisation.
Our Transformation Programme was set up to support the delivery of key components of our Future Shape strategy. In particular, the goal on delivering reliable, repeatable, and consistent services.
This is a big exercise and will take us multiple years, affecting the whole organisation. Therefore, we must move forward in stages. When we have delivered the first phase of the programme, that will put the foundations in place that will allow us to move faster with the rest of the programme for the benefit of our colleagues and residents.
Our Transformation Programme has four key areas of focus:
- The way we work
This includes how we deliver our services in the simplest most effective and efficient way, and how we work with each other to deliver our services to our residents. We have been working closely with colleagues in Income Management and Finance since April to design how we will deliver these services when we go live next year. The level of engagement, input and energy from these teams has been fantastic. - The tools we use
We’re investing in several systems, including a new Finance system and a new Housing Management System. We have partnered with two new providers (Unit4 for our Finance system and NEC for our Housing Management system).
We signed contracts in February this year, onboarded the new partners in March and started working on our requirements and design with them in April. In August we completed this process, and both partners have now started building the new systems to enable our new ways of working. - The data we use
This is really important. To be able to provide reliable, repeatable and consistent services we need to be able to make sure the right people, have the right information at the right time. We could have the best tools and brilliantly designed ways of working but without access to accurate information the impact will be limited. We are investing heavily to help improve the quality and availability of information.
We have worked with different teams to develop new processes that have allowed us to check almost one hundred million pieces of data! We’ve now found that about 6% of our data contains errors (such as duplicate or incomplete records), which means around six million data errors.
We are starting to clean this information up and changing the way we manage and maintain data in the future and arere making great progress with this. For example: we’ve reduced the 1.2 million addresses we previously held in historic systems to just 800k! This includes addresses for our properties, as well as resident’s previous and forwarding addresses, their emergency contacts and our supplier details. - The way we connect our data and tools together
We have a lot of applications and systems that have been connected as we’ve grown over the last few decades. Unfortunately, when doing this we didn’t track all the connections, so we have to unpick what we have now, then move to a much more modern way of connecting systems and data together.
This will mean that in the future we can plug in and unplug new systems and applications much more easily when we need to. We are only putting in two new systems in our first phase of transformation (housing and finance), but we have 600 applications to assess and make sure these all remain working when we go live.
Improving our data and introducing better ways of connecting our tools together will provide the bedrock to be able to really transform the level of service we provide to our residents. Our plan is to systematically move away from our current systems in a managed and controlled way.
And finally!
As well as looking at our finance and housing management systems, we also have a small number of change projects underway which run in parallel to the Transformation Programme. These include projects to deliver improvements to the way we deal with customer complaints and our resident’s repairs service.