Grand Union Housing has completed the development and launch of its Active Housing-based tenant portal. The new portal replaces three previous separate sites from before the merger of Aragon Housing, Rockingham Forest Housing and South Northants Homes.
Grand Union Housing uses Capita’s Open Housing as its main back-office system so Active Housing used its experience on other Capita integrations to connect with Capita’s web services to read and write data to and from Open Housing in real time and measure API performance early on in the project. Active Housing was also integrated with Capita’s Pay360 secure card portal for payments.
Both organisations agreed to take an Agile approach to the project. This involved fortnightly ‘sprints’ and made full use of Favro project management software to manage the delivery and backlog refinements.
Martin Stillwell, project manager, Active Housing, said, “This was an excellent collaboration between Grand Union Housing and us – our joint Agile approach was absolutely the cornerstone of the project’s overall success.”
Following a beta release, Grand Union’s portal went live in October 2018. Within ten weeks, the housing provider received around 2,000 registrations (approx. 20 per cent of its tenants), 14,500 logins and 14,000 online payments.
