Day 10, 100% success ratings
19 April 2008 08:25 | Leeds, Help Facility, Notify and Repond, Implementation, Action Plan, ALMO, Tension | Permalink
Back in London, and a chance to go through the Customer Feedback forms we handed out on a very rushed Friday of meetings and workshops.
Definitely a success. There were 5 representatives from the 3 ALMOs present on day 10.
Score for "Was the amount of time spent about right" - 5 out of 5 said YES.
Score for "Do you feel Caseworks can accommodate your needs" - 5 out of 5 said YES.
Any doubts?
One delegate indicated a desire for more understanding of the system before the session started. One regretted not having worked out their own procedures better before the two weeks started. One delegate wanted more individual time for his ALMO, rather than everything being a team activity.
General Comments?
Maddy Edwards, East North East Homes, said "Time spent on customisation was quite intense at times, but was necessary in order to achieve the desired outcome"
Our thoughts?
Very hard work! It felt like doing two jobs at once - a day of workshops, followed by an evening of customisation and enhancements.
Very difficult to deal with, effectively three customers, in the same workshop. Each ALMO could easily have justified their own database. I had a great deal of sympathy with the representative who would have liked one-to-one time. I hope we can provide some of this in subsequent meetings planned in Leeds.
Customisation might have been easier, if everyone had better understood the system and if they had got together and found more common ground on their procedures and forms, before we started.
Is there anything in this for other customers, who have had to wait for upgrades / enhancements?
Definitely. We have implemented many enhancements, most of which will be of general interest. Here are some of the more significant ones.
Definitely a success. There were 5 representatives from the 3 ALMOs present on day 10.
Score for "Was the amount of time spent about right" - 5 out of 5 said YES.
Score for "Do you feel Caseworks can accommodate your needs" - 5 out of 5 said YES.
Any doubts?
One delegate indicated a desire for more understanding of the system before the session started. One regretted not having worked out their own procedures better before the two weeks started. One delegate wanted more individual time for his ALMO, rather than everything being a team activity.
General Comments?
Maddy Edwards, East North East Homes, said "Time spent on customisation was quite intense at times, but was necessary in order to achieve the desired outcome"
Our thoughts?
Very hard work! It felt like doing two jobs at once - a day of workshops, followed by an evening of customisation and enhancements.
Very difficult to deal with, effectively three customers, in the same workshop. Each ALMO could easily have justified their own database. I had a great deal of sympathy with the representative who would have liked one-to-one time. I hope we can provide some of this in subsequent meetings planned in Leeds.
Customisation might have been easier, if everyone had better understood the system and if they had got together and found more common ground on their procedures and forms, before we started.
Is there anything in this for other customers, who have had to wait for upgrades / enhancements?
Definitely. We have implemented many enhancements, most of which will be of general interest. Here are some of the more significant ones.
- An Interview Preparation Screen, which will compliment the planned mobile solution
- A Counter Allegation facility, which will save everyone a lot of time
- A Tension monitoring database, previously requested by two customers
- Action Plan enhancements
- Context sensitive Help facilities
- Numerous enhancements of Notify and Respond, to make it suitable for Estate Inspection
Comments
A first in Blogging?
02 April 2008 18:56 | Leeds, Implementation, ALMO | Permalink
The Blog has been a bit quiet lately, mainly because we have been running around building new systems, developing existing systems, and hardly taking time for meals. Under pressure it is not always easy to be creative. However spending today in Leeds, discussing the planned Caseworks implementation workshops next week, gave me the idea that maybe no-one had ever done a Blog of a systems implementation. It is a risky strategy, given the number of high profile national IT projects which have gone over budget, over time and have been blamed for everything from Stock Market crashes to Baggage Handling bottle necks.
Suffice to say, that the Leeds ALMOs have purchased Caseworks, and (unlike some previous implementations) we and our customers are determined to be both thorough and rapid. Our strategy is to conduct a really focussed two week workshop, where 12 of us will practically live together, a bit like Big Brother. Not really, but my colleague and I are going to rent hotel rooms for a couple of weeks, and a meeting room is booked. The challenge is to do in 2 weeks, a process which has taken others months – and to do it properly. We plan to liaise and implement customisation changes with a 24 hour turnaround, and in the process our Leeds team will become experts in Caseworks and HUBSolutions will become experts on Leeds ASB procedures. The challenge is greater because there are effectively four customers – three ALMOs and a TMO are already working very differently - so the system is going to have to be very flexible indeed. Doubtless we will be rushing out system enhancements to meet their needs, and this is part of the challenge.
Today was very much Day One, the installation of an empty un-customised database on the Leeds servers. It all went smoothly, but the previous day where I was preparing the database was really the first stress point. Having earlier told Leeds that the Property Gazetteer they provided looked fine, I found it was in the new NLPG format which messed up my import routines. It took a half day to re-write the code; then it became obvious that despite the presence of 350,000 properties in the file, there were many others missing. A panic email to Leslie, my Leeds contact, and hopefully we are on our way to resolving this - the first of many problems I expect.
Read the next episode on Tuesday – I am hoping to get some guest contributions next week!
Suffice to say, that the Leeds ALMOs have purchased Caseworks, and (unlike some previous implementations) we and our customers are determined to be both thorough and rapid. Our strategy is to conduct a really focussed two week workshop, where 12 of us will practically live together, a bit like Big Brother. Not really, but my colleague and I are going to rent hotel rooms for a couple of weeks, and a meeting room is booked. The challenge is to do in 2 weeks, a process which has taken others months – and to do it properly. We plan to liaise and implement customisation changes with a 24 hour turnaround, and in the process our Leeds team will become experts in Caseworks and HUBSolutions will become experts on Leeds ASB procedures. The challenge is greater because there are effectively four customers – three ALMOs and a TMO are already working very differently - so the system is going to have to be very flexible indeed. Doubtless we will be rushing out system enhancements to meet their needs, and this is part of the challenge.
Today was very much Day One, the installation of an empty un-customised database on the Leeds servers. It all went smoothly, but the previous day where I was preparing the database was really the first stress point. Having earlier told Leeds that the Property Gazetteer they provided looked fine, I found it was in the new NLPG format which messed up my import routines. It took a half day to re-write the code; then it became obvious that despite the presence of 350,000 properties in the file, there were many others missing. A panic email to Leslie, my Leeds contact, and hopefully we are on our way to resolving this - the first of many problems I expect.
Read the next episode on Tuesday – I am hoping to get some guest contributions next week!
Late night workout in Newcastle
25 January 2008 07:36 | ALMO, Bulk Update | Permalink
Well, not quite Newcastle - South Tyneside to be precise - and nothing to do with Kevin Keegan or Northern Rock (these spurious references are just to get our Google rating up!). No, Thursday night was a late night for the ASB Team in South Shields, updating thousands of Caseworks Case Records, to categorise those which are the responsibilty of the newly formed Housing ALMO.
We got an urgent call on Thursday lunch time for assistance in updating the "Domain" of all their cases. We agreed if they emailed lists of references, we would bulk update the cases on the SQL Server Database. At one point in the afternoon, lists were coming in from four different sources every half hour, and they carried on working on it until nearly 8pm. In the end, their email system gave up the ghost and they read the numbers out over the phone!
The panic didn't end there. When I logged in the next morning, three more emails were awaiting me! At lunch time, we had to do an out-of-schedule refresh of all their reports, so that they could be presented to an important Council Meeting. I used to work for a London Council, and well know the feeling of turning up, somewhat unprepared for a scrutiny meeting with figures hurredly put together just 10 minutes earlier. Andy, the South Tyneside manager in this unenviable position, seemed truly relieved and grateful for our input, enough for me to text him a later update on the figures an hour later.
We got an urgent call on Thursday lunch time for assistance in updating the "Domain" of all their cases. We agreed if they emailed lists of references, we would bulk update the cases on the SQL Server Database. At one point in the afternoon, lists were coming in from four different sources every half hour, and they carried on working on it until nearly 8pm. In the end, their email system gave up the ghost and they read the numbers out over the phone!
The panic didn't end there. When I logged in the next morning, three more emails were awaiting me! At lunch time, we had to do an out-of-schedule refresh of all their reports, so that they could be presented to an important Council Meeting. I used to work for a London Council, and well know the feeling of turning up, somewhat unprepared for a scrutiny meeting with figures hurredly put together just 10 minutes earlier. Andy, the South Tyneside manager in this unenviable position, seemed truly relieved and grateful for our input, enough for me to text him a later update on the figures an hour later.