L&Q won the gold award in the IT team of the year category of the inaugural Housing Technology 2024 awards. Andrew Makinson, head of delivery for business applications at L&Q outlines more about the housing provider’s prize-winning team.
You’d be hard pushed to find a tougher operating environment than the one facing the housing sector. Against a backdrop of reduced rental income, a new regulatory environment and increased labour costs, our capacity is squeezed, our resilience is being tested and every penny is having to go further.
Changing our mindset
Embracing new ways of working is essential if we are to keep up with a changing landscape and be responsive to market conditions. We’ll only improve residents’ satisfaction if we change how we operate and challenge the status quo.
It was this mindset that was integral to our recent success at the Housing Technology awards in March 2024 where L&Q’s BizApps delivery team was honoured to be named IT team of the year.
Legacy practices prevent us from getting to grips with potential inefficiencies and keep us in the dark about unnecessary costs. That’s why we’ve been transforming our systems and processes using IT projects as the levers for change.
Creation of L&Q’s Bizapps team
In 2022 we launched our new Bizapps team, tasked with overhauling our approach to IT project management, and since then, we’ve recruited over 100 people for new roles. By working across operations, processes, teams and technologies, we’re driving change through a range of improvement initiatives spanning the business, from sustainability and arrears management to repairs and health and safety.
For example, as a housing provider responsible for 105,000 homes, we have a duty to maintain over 50,000 trees – as many as there are in Epping Forest. We previously recorded our tree-maintenance activities manually via spreadsheets – a time-consuming exercise that was prone to human error. We’ve now implemented a trees and grounds maintenance management application, and this has provided a step change in our ability to carry out this work. In terms of cost-savings, this has equated to a £300,000 saving in failed maintenance visits per year, an efficiency saving of over £100,000 per year and a reduction in around 500 reported health and safety incidents per year.
Custom software for arrears
We’ve also implemented new custom-made software to help us evolve a more efficient approach to debt and late payments. Built in-house, we’re saving over £1.2 million per year after moving away from an off-the-shelf system.
Access and convenience are important – we know that residents are less likely to make payments if there are barriers to doing so. Our new platform gives us full customisation capabilities so that residents receive a personalised SMS or email with a link to a mobile-optimised, self-service environment. By enabling residents to make payments at any time and any place, we’re collecting more funds and using fewer in-house resources.
But this isn’t about cost savings alone; it’s also about understanding our residents more and providing better services to them. Empathetic and empowering communication is key; for example, our new reminder method is more convenient for residents and puts them in control.
Digital health & safety
We’ve also delivered a new health and safety management system which digitises accident and incident management, risk assessments, inspections and audits, and issues permits to work. iSafe provides a one-stop shop for health and safety across L&Q and has led to a 50 per cent time-saving in completing incident reports and a 35 per cent reduction in cases requiring escalation.
To be able to provide reliable, repeatable and consistent services, we need to make sure the right people have the right information at the right time. That means a seamless flow of reliable data across our entire data ecosystem and a single version of the truth.
100 million pieces of data…
The first steps of our journey towards that vision were made through our BizApps data management project. As part of L&Q’s £45 million transformation programme, we have developed new processes that have allowed us to check almost one hundred million pieces of data.
We’ve found that about six per cent contains errors (such as duplicate or incomplete records), which means around six million data errors. We’re starting to clean this information and we’ve already reduced the 1.2 million addresses we previously held in historic systems to just 800,000.
Information access
No matter what sector you work in, the way you handle information and the systems you use to do so are essential to operating effectively and delivering for your customers.
If frontline staff don’t need to spend half a day looking for information, they can spend more time in front of residents. More face-to-face contact leads to improved communication with residents, and a faster resolution of any problems they’re experiencing.
One relatively simple but essential ingredient to BizApp’s success has been our work to define responsibilities and improve our relationships with the business. For BizApps project managers, it’s not just about delivering technical outputs in a transactional environment; recognising that project managers have a broader scope of responsibilities including end-to-end management and internal relationships has vastly improved client satisfaction.
Passionate problem-solvers
When recruiting our Bizapps project managers, we looked for passionate problem-solvers with the right qualifications and good communication skills. Focusing on attitudes and behaviours as well as technical ability has helped us create a dynamic where people are encouraged to work together, challenge convention and adopt a shared responsibility for a project’s success.
A recent example of those behaviours was the implementation of our new repairs platform last year. With the aim of reducing a backlog of repairs, our internal training team were forced to withdraw at short notice. BizApps stepped in to produce training materials and deliver classroom training to over 30 users at the last minute. As a result, we were able to maintain project timescales and residents are now benefitting from an improved repairs experience.
Internal confidence
We measure not only the impact we have on our residents but also the confidence our colleagues have in us as a delivery capability. To do this, we introduced net promoter scores (NPS) when BizApps was launched in 2022 to measure internal stakeholder satisfaction. At the time, our NPS score was 54 per cent; by December 2023, it had exceeded industry benchmarks, and it has risen every quarter since to reach 71 per cent.
We are delighted that the efforts of our BizApps team have been recognised by Housing Technology. Our award shows what can be achieved in social housing when we strive to work collaboratively, take responsibility for delivering lasting solutions and bring passionate, impact-driven people together.
Andrew Makinson is the head of delivery for business applications at L&Q. The housing provider won the gold award for IT team of the year at the Housing Technology 2024 awards.
