Earlier this year, Clearview completed a comprehensive data mapping and reporting project at Victory Housing Trust, including the implementation of its business intelligence and reporting suite of software. The aim of the project was improve the speed, transparency and accuracy of Victory’s corporate and operational reporting to support service improvements and achieve ‘top 10 per cent’ tenant satisfaction levels.
Hugh Unwin, head of customer support, Victory Housing Trust, said, “We decided to embark on this project with Clearview in order to achieve the two main parts of our corporate plan. The first was to deliver timely and accurate performance reporting to enable service improvements, and the second was to reduce our reporting overhead and give managers and staff the reporting data they need.”
Victory’s business reports were previously created in-house by taking data from a wide variety of disparate sources, including external systems. The compilation and consolidation of the various data sets was mostly done by hand and not widely-understood, making it slow and prone to errors. The housing provider therefore decided to work with Clearview to create a suite of automated, reliable and dynamic operational dashboards.
The first stage of the project involved finding out the expectations and needs of Victory’s heads of services, including any new data to be included in the dashboards. Part of the challenge for Clearview was to investigate and validate the information being displayed in the reports, including talking to the members of staff who produced the current reports to find out what data was already being captured and how it was being processed.
The second stage was to find a way of producing a range of reports that were not only easy to understand and interpret correctly, but were also rigorous from a data capture and analysis point of view. It was also important that the relevant members of staff could immediately access the underlying data used in the reports so that any anomalies could be explained, corrected or acted on as soon as possible.
In some cases, this meant mapping the process of how the data was captured to ensure that the right data was being recorded and sometimes, more importantly, understanding the frequency of the data capture. This process mapping then enabled Victory to decide whether to invest time, energy and effort in either changing how the data was captured or accepting the current process and the limitations that it would put on its reporting.
Extensive work was then carried out by Clearview to tune, reconfigure and align Victory’s data sources. This enabled the automation of its corporate KPIs and resulted in the creation of a number of new operational reports.
Unwin said, “Overall, this project has improved the quality and availability of our reporting while reducing our production overheads, giving everyone a dynamic and comprehensive view of service performance. This means we can intervene before service thresholds are reached and base our service planning and forecasting on higher quality information.”
