Social housing boom: Streamline projects with centralized software

New regulations and ambitious building targets in the UK are overwhelming social housing providers. Centralized project management software can be the key to success, offering clear goals, real-time data, and improved collaboration

Being a provider of social housing in the UK got a lot more challenging recently. The Regulator of Social Housing’s decision to bring in new standards on maintenance and tenant-satisfaction reporting created major new tasks. But the new Labour government’s pledge to create 1.5 million homes in the next few years has taken things up a further notch.

Huge building schemes, collating the opinions of thousands of tenants and finding new ways to make repairs rapidly are all big projects that councils and housing associations will have to find a way to manage. Centralised software solutions are probably the most likely way for them to achieve satisfactory outcomes.

A strong, innovative PM software system can provide organisations with several advantages.

Technology in social housing

Project aims, how they fit into an organisation’s overall strategy and the benefits to its staff and tenants can be set out clearly on one central dashboard. Teams can feed back easily via the software, making sure that the project will work for them. This brings clarity and motivates staff, giving projects momentum and avoiding drift. It shows staff how their task during a project will contribute to its important goals, giving them a sense of involvement and ownership well beyond simply being told what to do from on high.

An innovative project dashboard can send out automatic updates to show staff how their work has already benefited tenants or met great milestones. This could be anything from details of an uptick in tenant satisfaction scores to how 50 families have just moved into the first houses of a big construction project.

There is a huge amount of admin involved in running a big project. A well-designed software solution allows for everyone involved to feed in the latest data, budget updates and other information from their work, in real-time. This means PMs don’t have to waste time gathering information, which they should be spending on ensuring the project is a success.

Real-time data and clear goals

The software can also analyse data and input it into report templates, making it far faster and easier to supply senior leaders with interim and end-of-project updates. It also means that if someone leaves a council, halfway through a project, there’s no need to spend hours looking for project work schedules, contact details, task requests, technical documents and any other information that might otherwise be scattered through spreadsheets, emails and the like.

If everyone from outside suppliers to council maintenance teams and HR staff are working on a project through the same central dashboard, it creates better team spirit and collaboration. The frustrating, money- and time-consuming scenarios where two different teams have done much the same task due to working in silos and lack of coordination are far less likely to occur.

Having the latest updates on task fulfilment and resource levels in front of them in real-time gives senior leaders the chance to provide support to staff, without them having to ask for it. Timely interventions that prevent more serious problems from developing can thus be avoided.

Software providers should give staff training on the PM fundamentals that underpin a software solution. Along with the assistance provided by the system, this will provide teams with the principles to complete a project successfully, avoiding the need to bring in costly outside PM specialists.

Dashboards can also set out the tasks, inputs and approvals everyone in a project team must complete before it can go live. This can avoid the resentment, wasted resources and even project failure that may occur if a project is imposed on staff too soon, without them being given a chance to understand how their everyday work will be affected.

Flowlio offers a unique end-to-end project-management SaaS, along with full training in how to operate it. For this and other Flowlio training solutions, please visit www.flowlio.co.uk