What’s your background in social housing?
My housing career began in 2006 at the Guinness Partnership where I was involved in several large digital transformation projects. I then moved to Harvest Housing in 2009 where I led the technology workstream of the merger between Harvest Housing and Arena Housing to form what is now Your Housing Group.
I moved to First Choice Homes in 2013 where I led some innovative projects around repairs, insourcing digital services and implementing a new IT infrastructure. After I left First Choice, I started working as a consultant, reviewing challenging projects and helping several housing providers and local government organisations to bring their projects back in line.
Which housing providers have you worked with?
I’ve worked with Aspire Housing to design and deliver a huge digital transformation project, and I helped Berneslai Homes to deliver a new repairs solution which included appointment scheduling and mobile solutions for operatives. I trained 30 young people from the government’s ‘kick start’ scheme and the community engagement team at Catalyst Housing in the Flowlio project management framework. As a result, some secured jobs with Catalyst and others gained skills for their CVs to attract potential employers.
What are the biggest problems around project management?
Many projects stumble because there is no single system that provides a central area for all project information. People use spreadsheets and other task-driven project management solutions with little or no integration, resulting in poor reporting and decision-making.
Poor governance and control, poor contract management and single points of failure in project teams cause huge problems. This often results in stalled or failed projects costing time, money and affecting staff morale, service delivery and customer service.
Staff retention is a problem. The recruitment market for skilled project managers is very competitive, salaries are high and good project managers tend to move on after a short time, affecting projects and in some cases stopping them in their tracks.
Being able to sustain good project delivery is increasingly important. It’s imperative to have a flexible framework that everyone is signed up to, right from the people who will benefit from the project on the ground to the delivery teams and senior leaders. Delivering successful projects should encourage a collaborative mindset which becomes part of an organisation’s culture.
How about the government’s plan to build 1.5 million houses?
Building more homes, creating communities and reducing homelessness is obviously a good thing. Housing is a sector where there are many competing priorities. The need to build new homes, the need to remain compliant and viable, and the need to continually improve and transform services while providing business as usual and satisfying employees and residents all have to be balanced.
The government’s five-year pledge puts more pressure on housing providers to deliver at a time when the sector is having to respond to some of the biggest challenges it has ever faced. Meeting timescales, with reduced resources and funds, will have an impact which may mean improvement plans for other services may have to be shelved.
What’s the impact of the Regulator of Social Housing’s new standards?
The Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 came in last year and I think one of the biggest problems is the scale and pace of change and being able to keep up.
The new regulations have turned the housing landscape upside down. There is now even more scrutiny and pressure to provide information showing how housing providers are performing. They are having to respond by creating projects which they may not have planned for; this can impact resources, increase costs and introduce unknown risks and issues to deal with.
Some housing providers still operate legacy IT systems, making it difficult to obtain data and manipulate it into useful insights. A consequence of this is often poor-quality data and duplicated data, making it difficult to provide accurate and up-to-date information. This is where projects may be needed to update or replace systems.
The other challenge is housing providers having the people, capacity and capabilities to obtain and safely manipulate the data that the regulator needs. Some organisations still don’t treat data as an asset and will therefore need to create projects to produce the right data for the regulator.
If projects aren’t started, delivered, managed and reported on in a controlled way, some housing providers risk not meeting the new regulatory standards. It is therefore more important than ever to have a framework, platform and trained staff to support the delivery of successful projects.
What are the fundamentals of project management?
The process of delivering projects should be simple, not complex, and there are some key things that make delivery easier.
The first is actually having a reason for doing a project in the first place and knowing its priority. Second is ensuring that the delivery team knows exactly what they are doing and what needs to be delivered. Third is having the right delivery tools so that delivery teams can manage, plan, deal with problems, learn from lessons and make key decisions.
Next up is having a mechanism to transfer a project into ‘business as usual’ seamlessly and to make sure the business is ready to accept a project into live operation, then finally closing a project properly and measuring its performance, outcomes and benefits.
Communication in projects is crucial; good projects get delivered when people talk and come together to solve problems. In addition, all projects need some form of structure, even the agile ones. There needs to be governance, accountability and an audit trail that enables real-time reporting.
Access to information is really important; so many projects stall (or fail) when information can’t be found or isn’t shared. It’s therefore vital to have a system that centralises project information and puts it into a single easy and accessible format.
People need time and space to deliver projects well; when this is recognised, realistic timescales can be achieved, enabling people to thrive and enjoy the work they are doing. Good project delivery enables people to manage ‘plate spinning’ and resource management easily through visible information. This way, constraints and bottlenecks can be dealt with before they become problems.
Good projects have support and buy-in from senior leaders. They are there to remove barriers and they are often the people ultimately responsible for delivery so they need to be actively engaged in the whole delivery lifecycle. Furthermore, good projects have trained staff across the board and embed standard ways of working that deliver results and reduce siloed working.
How can project management technology help?
Technology should make things easier and speed things up for project teams, reducing the time they spend doing unnecessary work. It should help an organisation to prioritise its projects and align them with strategic plans so that the right outcomes get delivered resulting from time, resources and money being focused in the right areas.
Project management technology should provide data that’s insight-rich so the right decisions can be made at the right time, in particular showing where projects are being delivered well and highlight those experiencing difficulties.
A project management platform should give senior leaders an overall view of all projects within their portfolios so they can step into projects when extra support is needed. Furthermore, a good end-to-end platform should break down silo working and improve collaboration.
Overall, a project management platform should reduce waste, reduce risk, introduce standard ways of working and improve the overall cultural approach to delivering the best strategic outcomes for housing providers’ residents.
Stephen Repton is the CEO and founder of OneConsulting and Flowlio.
