Covalent has been busy lately, with Knowsley Housing Trust and Halton Housing Trust both rolling out its corporate performance management system in a bid to consolidate their reporting systems and KPI tools.
KHT needed to bring together performance information, corporate plans, action plans and risk management information from disparate applications into one coherent system, enabling KHT’s managers to have everything they need in one place, as well as better and faster user and board reporting, and streamlining the preparations required for its Audit Commission inspection.
The Covalent system has been adopted with enthusiasm throughout KHT. Performance reporting is covered via 130 ‘snapshots’ that deliver personalised views to key users, summarising performance from multiple perspectives. KHT’s strategies, priorities and objectives are encapsulated in its corporate improvement plan on the Covalent system, covering areas such as audit recommendations, equality and diversity strategies, inspection action plans and best value reviews, with over 2000 actions managed on the system. KHT’s system also tracks more than 250 individual risks across different areas of the business, based on specific probabilities and potential impacts, together with over 700 KPIs assigned to specific owners.
Janet Daniels, assistant director for corporate services, Knowsley Housing Trust, said, “Covalent has transformed the way we manage performance by unifying what were previously many different systems across the organisation. We now do all our reporting of KPIs, risks and actions on Covalent, so every manager knows what they have to do while the board now has all the detail they need in their Covalent performance reports, with a trend view that makes it very easy to pick out what’s happening. In particular, we can now easily track progress on action plans and key projects to quickly identify potential problem areas.”
The system was installed in only six weeks. Janet Daniels said, “From a technical perspective, external hosting meant a simpler and much faster implementation, and no technical system maintenance to concern us.”
Having embarked on a 10-year, £129 million programme to improve the quality of its homes and the surrounding environment, Halton Housing Trust has also signed with Covalent.
Scott Amos, head of performance and improvement, Halton Housing Trust, said, “We are always looking to improve the way we deal with the administration relating to our performance and improvement programmes. We are inundated with multiple action logs, performance indicators and risk registers, so we wanted the ability to link these together in one performance management system.”
The system enables HHT to track, monitor and update its various improvement models, helping it to meet regulatory requirements while also improving internal communications by giving its staff a clear understanding of their contribution to the service improvements.
