Meet the Team: Andy French
This week marked my first anniversary of working for Manifest Consulting. It’s been a thoroughly enjoyable year and it is fantastic to be working as part of a talented, flexible team.
Opinion: The Access Conundrum – Are we missing a trick?
I’ve been inspired by the recent ASCP National Social Housing Safety & Compliance Week’s excellent session on gaining access to residents homes to write a little of my thoughts on this subject that we didn’t get a chance to explore more in the session.
Improving the Property Development handover process
It’s been great working with Optivo to help them develop an end-to-end solution for managing property handovers from Development to Housing. The new solution has:
- Eliminated unstructured data and documentation
- Automated processes
- Facilitated simple review of new property data by operational staff
- Reduced risk of data input errors
- Made effective use of existing technology
We have been really pleased to have been working closely with Optivo over the last few months. We’ve participated as an addition to their technical team in a project to create brand new systems and processes for managing the capture and flow of information from property development, through to operational housing management.
The accurate and timely transfer of all the data required for the day-to-day management of properties is a common issue in the sector. Paper based procedures still endure to this day in some organisations. Optivo set out to deal with this, once and for all.
Optivo’s Technology Team built a new bespoke application for use by Development staff to support their work and ensure all relevant data is captured and verified in one place. Data is then passed to their housing management system where it’s initially staged, pending review by staff from the operational side of the business. Eventually property and charge records are created, ready for streamlining what was previously a more labour-intensive set of tasks.
We found the project was very well run by the team at Optivo with effective, pragmatic project management and business analysis throughout.
This implementation, and future phases to extend the functionality will have a very positive impact on how this part of the housing lifecycle operates and we would recommend it as an approach to other organisations. It should also support the adoption of Building Information Management (BIM) and Golden Thread initiatives as they come into being.
If you’re interested in knowing more about this work, please contact us at hello@manifestconsulting.co.uk or call 0203 797 1012.
Are you investing wisely in your housing software – 8 things to consider
To get the best out of your housing software Gareth Rexworthy, our Managing and Commercial Director shares eight things you should consider before deciding whether you should move to a new system,
Business Applications Management Service (BAMS)
Manifest are actively working on the development of a broad, more consistent and enhanced level of application management service for customers, building on the typical model of more ad-hoc services currently offered.
Tenant Portals: 6 ways to encourage tenant take up
Tenant portals or similar online services are a growing trend in the housing sector. And they have certainly come a long way since they first appeared on the market in 2000.
Does your association still not have a current IT Strategy?
What’s the problem?
It is surprising the number of organisations that don’t have a current IT Strategy; it’s often all too easy to give priority to other corporate projects and think that the IT Strategy, which will take a concerted effort to produce, will have to wait until tomorrow. The trouble is that something else always comes along tomorrow and it never gets started or if it does insufficient resources are focussed on it and it takes several months to produce anything coherent.
Late Autumn Networking Drinks
We’d like you to join us for our networking drinks event
Thursday 22 November 2018, 17.30 to 20.00
Central London venue
Please register HERE to receive location details.
We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible!