Happy Christmas

Christmas is the season of silly snaps of meals and parties, and HUBSolutions is no exception. People always like the ones which show someone in a compromised position, but our meal never got to be quite that silly, maybe the presence of the younger generation, and David wanting to get back to add some more issues to the Issue Log somewhat contained the Christmas spirit.
The meal seemed an ideal opportunity to publish our photos, as I am sure there are some staff who customers have only spoken to over the telephone or by email. From bottom left around the table, they are Prathibha who started the Caseworks Mapping facility, Kitty, Selvi's five year old daughter, Selvi, who built all the Caseworks Web Pages, Me, Arlene who does the accounts and a spot of Caseworks training, David who does most of the Caseworks training and a great deal else besides, Krish who created the email facility, mobile working and finished the mapping facility and Manish, whose Oracle skills power our various Revenues and Benefits Applications.
Absent, were Kishore (who took the picture) and colleagues in other countries, David Scott - in Scotland, Zareena - in Saudi Arabia and Chris Parker skiing in the Alps.

EMAIL TheBlog@hubsolutions.co.uk with the snap of your ASB Team Christmas party - we would all like to see it!

Finally, Christmas is more than anything about children, whether you are religious or not, and I couldn't resist including this sweet picture of Kitty, the first (but not the last) baby to be born to a member of staff while working for HUBSolutions.

Happy Christmas and New Year!

Men in Red

Guess who they are!

Eddie McCall and Rodger Harley, two of South Lanarkshire's army of 30 + trusty Wardens who patrol the streets day and night looking for things like this - a load of old rubbish.

A deliberate act of Anti Social Beahviour, and what are they doing? No, not playing Solitaire!

The rubbish is being recorded so that a photograph, the GPS Coordinates and full details of its volume can be uploaded to the Caseworks Database and forwarded to the Cleansing Department the same day.

There is a close-up on our News page, which lets you see the PDA Smart Phone more clearly. As readers will know, the Blog is a little bit less formal, and I always like to find a lighter side to any story. A little while after I took the first picture, the phone rings. Would any of my readers care to provide a speach bubble for this call? Yes, a bit like Private Eye. Come up with a good one, and you will get a prize.

On a more serious note, there was light rain when I took this picture, and it is forecast to be heavy rain, every day for the next four days. After six weeks of wet and often sub-zero weather, isnt it amazing that all the devices are still working! Actually, isnt it amazing that Eddie and Rodger are still working!!

The Caseworker is Out!

Issue 4 of The Caseworker hit the World Wide Web this week, and is already filling many user's In Box. Those of you who also read this blog, please give me a bit of feedback! Either comment on the Blog, or email Caseworker@hubsolutions.co.uk

Anyway some feedback has arrived in my In Box so I will share it

"The caseworker model looks and feels very nice .... St Georges Square looks amazing as ever and brings back fond memories" Gerry McDougall, Portsmouth

"I have to say I really enjoyed reading The Caseworker....... A great update for me since i've been away for some time now." Zareena

Many thanks to both of you - and to my colleague David for sending them all out.

For those who haven't seen it, this is a "thumb nail". EMail Caseworker@hubsolutions.co.uk for your copy.

Christmas Cheer

Christmas coming... then it will be time for new year's resolutions. Mine, is to ensure I do at least one blog entry each month - whats yours? You can tell me by clicking the comments box, then you will be committed.

The Caseworks Newsletter is going out soon, with a rather impressive picture of Christmas in Glasgow on the front page. It seemed a good idea to include it here, to cheer up anyone feeling a bit depressed by the Credit Crunch. Whatever the weather, and whatever the financial situation, Glasgow is determined to have a good Christmas, and I have no hesitation in recommending readers to come here for a Christmas break Check out their website to see the rest - http://www.winterfestglasgow.com/
mmm, has this got anything to do with HUBSolutions or Caseworks or are we going a bit off message here? Well slightly. I have been spending most of my time in Glasgow for the last six weeks, so when I say the city, shopping, night life, cultural events and surrounding countryside are great, I am talking from experience. More importantly, I have recruited our first Scottish employee to help me out with the volume of work.

There is quite a lot of job satisfaction up here right now, with Glasgow Community and Security Services expressing delight with the new Mediation Database and other goodies which my colleague, David, and I have delivered. Then South Lanarkshire has gone live with the Mobile solution, and yesterday declared it to be a success worthy of publicity. I am hoping to get a photo of one of those wardens working in wintry conditions, keying some vital piece of information into his smart phone, for transmission to Caseworks Notify and Respond. All credit to my colleague, Krish, for this achievement, having taken the prototype Mobile solution to pieces and rebuilt it as a completely robust and sophisticated piece of software.

A sign?

Back in business?

Well I took a holiday from the Blog, largley because of the workload crisis caused by Leeds, so it is perhaps appropriate that the most interesting feedback I have had from my Blog has come from that same Yorkshire City. Remember this sign post, I bumped into on my first trip to Leeds - features in an earlier Blog?

Seemed like a pretty strange thing to put in the city centre, especially when it is so far from the sea. Well the truth is even stranger. Apparently it is a quote from the bible (Luke).

Leslie, who has been a trusty intermediary at Leeds, between HUBSolutions and the Leeds ALMOs sent me this fascinating piece of research.

"I was having a look on your website to see if I could find anything about the user groups - we're going to set up an internal user group here for Caseworks.

I got sucked into the blog & came across a question about the throw yourself into the sea signpost. Please see below, if you're still curious. Two Christian artists, Pippa Hale and Stuart Tarbuck, have been posting unusual lines from the Bible around Leeds to mark a city-side festival of the visual arts. Their project is called Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin -- words from the story told in Daniel (Daniel 5: 25-30) which appeared on King Belshazzar's palace wall and warned him of his impending death. There are 13 of these Biblical quotes, which include some of Jesus's sayings, posted on signposts, paving stones, park benches, shop widows and billboards. The public are likely to be taken aback by some of the lines chosen, which include: "Go throw yourself into the sea," and "Blessed are the breasts". The latter is taken from Luke 23: 29: â??Blessed are the barren women, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed,â?? (NIV). Outside Toni and Guy's, a fashionable hair salon in one busy shopping street, appear the words:

"The hairs on your head are numbered".

So now you know! Lesley Aird"

Oh, and by the way in just three months Leeds have entered several hundred cases, and yes it is the time of the year to plan the next Northern User Group.

Thanks Leslie for getting me back into Blog mode - feedback makes it all worthwhile!

Thankyou to South Tyneside

I thought I would have to dedicate this Blog entry to the staff at South Tyneside, who made me very welcome last week, and booked me into a lovely hotel overlooking the harbour mouth. South Shields must surely be one of Britain's lesser known seaside resorts, but it really has a magificent sandy beach second to none, brilliant restaurants and a fascinating history with connections with Grace Darling and the Venerable Bede.

Part of the purpose of the latest photo competition in The Caseworker is to promote the destinations where our customers work, and this is a real hidden gem. The photo is the view from my bedroom window (yes, a port hole) in the Little Haven Hotel. I will get my web developer to set up a photo gallery to show readers my other pictures.

Oh, and it was two days of hard work, as well, productive for me and the Client I think.

Memory for Caseworks

This is the first blog entry for a month. An unbelievably busy one, in which I have been working on the Leeds implementation for a part of every day, and found time to visit customers in the Midlands, Scotland and the North East and have two days holiday on the continent.

However, back on the Blog now, and keen to share with customers a little learning experience about memory. I have come to the conclusion that you cant have too much of it, and the "recommended memory" for new customers needs to be considerably increased. It came as a bit of a shock when the new Leeds system was unbearably slow in training. The server never seemed to be working very hard, but the relatively small amount of on-board memory (1 GByte) was permanently used to capacity. I recommended they increase it, and within 24 hours an upgrade to 3 GBytes was performed and the problem was resolved. Since then I have been looking at the memory other customers have, and found the record to be held by South Tyneside at a staggering 10 GBytes. I had the pleasure of using their system on Thursday and Friday, and the benefit was obvious. Every page - including some of their staggering 500 + link cases - loaded with lightning speed.

The lesson, memory is cheap, waiting is expensive!

Day 10, 100% success ratings

Back in London, and a chance to go through the Customer Feedback forms we handed out on a very rushed Friday of meetings and workshops.

Definitely a success. There were 5 representatives from the 3 ALMOs present on day 10.

Score for "Was the amount of time spent about right" - 5 out of 5 said YES.

Score for "Do you feel Caseworks can accommodate your needs" - 5 out of 5 said YES.

Any doubts?

One delegate indicated a desire for more understanding of the system before the session started. One regretted not having worked out their own procedures better before the two weeks started. One delegate wanted more individual time for his ALMO, rather than everything being a team activity.

General Comments?

Maddy Edwards, East North East Homes, said "Time spent on customisation was quite intense at times, but was necessary in order to achieve the desired outcome"

Our thoughts?

Very hard work! It felt like doing two jobs at once - a day of workshops, followed by an evening of customisation and enhancements.

Very difficult to deal with, effectively three customers, in the same workshop. Each ALMO could easily have justified their own database. I had a great deal of sympathy with the representative who would have liked one-to-one time. I hope we can provide some of this in subsequent meetings planned in Leeds.

Customisation might have been easier, if everyone had better understood the system and if they had got together and found more common ground on their procedures and forms, before we started.

Is there anything in this for other customers, who have had to wait for upgrades / enhancements?

Definitely. We have implemented many enhancements, most of which will be of general interest. Here are some of the more significant ones.

• An Interview Preparation Screen, which will compliment the planned mobile solution


• A Counter Allegation facility, which will save everyone a lot of time


• A Tension monitoring database, previously requested by two customers


• Action Plan enhancements


• Context sensitive Help facilities


• Numerous enhancements of Notify and Respond, to make it suitable for Estate Inspection

Day 9, Leeds Cafe culture

Day 9, found me abandon the workshop to my colleague David, in pursuit of a missing 70,000 properties from the Property Gazetteer. A brief meeting with Rachel, sorted this out, and left me in the city centre, with time to kill and a lot of work to do on my laptop.

People who know me, know that one of my habits, is finding a nice cafe which has powerpoints and plugging myself in with a very large latte and cake for an hour or two. Leeds boasts plenty of interesting venues, and, indeed the walk around town, was interesting. I passed this giant chess game outside the library, and then walked into the city art gallery (well worth a visit) and the cafe. The Council run cafe was quite a magnificent Victorian tiled room, which at first sight seemed to offer everything except power points - they obviously did not want to spoil the 100 year old tiles. However, the problem was solved when I noticed floor level trap doors, under which were double sockets. Excellent - and the coffee was nice as well!

Night 7 in Leeds

Its nearly 10pm on Night 7 - and this is the view from my hotel window. Yes, the HUBSolutions Office Manager, Arlene, has put David and myself in a hotel right next to the giant Tetley's Brewery. Was this deliberate? We may even have indulged in a glass or two this evening.

The day shift worked hard today, testing the new data entry forms, and the Action Plans. I must confess, I took time out from the workshop to cross the city and pick up a fresh property extract from the NLPG team - hopefully, with all the properties included this time around! Now I have the rest of the night to import it ready for tomorrow's testing.

Leeds West North West gives us coverage

Arriving at 10am in Leeds this morning, we were greeted with a nice surprise. One of the ALMOs - West North West - had given Caseworks a full page spread in their staff newsletter.

It was good, therefore, to be able to unveil, something approaching a fully customised system in our morning demo. All the main screens are ready for use now, and we can start hands-on testing, to decide whether the flow is correct.

We have also introduced a couple of ideas from the workshop, which I am sure other customers will find interesting. A TensionDatabase, to record more general community tension and an Interview Prep form, to record questions which will be put to the offender prior to an interview. I am excited about the Interview Prep, because it is not only obvious good practice, but also will be the first stage for our planned mobile solution for ASB Interview recording.

Day 4, and how different can you get?

It is 10pm in Leeds, and I have just imported into the system and tidied up the results of today's workshop.

Each ALMO has customised its own Actions and Outcomes. We have had to enhance the software in two areas, to make it possible for completely different customisations to co-exist in the same database. My colleague Selvi, has been emailing ASP pages to us from London. Finally I can see the fruits of our efforts - hopefully the clients will be at least slightly impressed in the morning.

If you log into a "West North West" case, you get these Action choices:


If you log into an "Aire Valley" case, you get these Action choices:-

But if you log into an "East North East" case, you get something completely different, which reflects a very different approach:-

Apart from the work, the weather has gorgous at lunch time, when David and I took a sandwich break on a hillside park by the office and admired the view of the Yorkshire Dales, and was terrible in the evening when we took shelter in a local restaurant to get out of the freezing rain. Colleagues in London tell me it was sunny all day there!

Leeds, Day 3

What happened to Days 1 and 2? Quite simply when the day begins at 7am and ends at 1am it is a bit hard to find time to write a Blog!

However, we are at Day 3, and so far the blitz strategy for customisation seems to be working. Today users were able to key in their first Case, now the Data Entry screen has been fully customised. The biggest challenge for David and myself is actually having three customers in the same room, with very different ideas about how to do things. We are currently working on Actions and this is proving pretty demanding. Already we have made several minor enhancements to the system to cope with the need for multiple versions of the same thing.

We have had very limited time to look around Leeds and sample the local restaurants and bars. Yesterday morning I took my camera out and took a couple of snaps of the attractive riverside development where we are staying. I am mystified about the meaning of this signpost though - things aren't that bad. Does anyone know what it means?

A first in Blogging?

The Blog has been a bit quiet lately, mainly because we have been running around building new systems, developing existing systems, and hardly taking time for meals. Under pressure it is not always easy to be creative. However spending today in Leeds, discussing the planned Caseworks implementation workshops next week, gave me the idea that maybe no-one had ever done a Blog of a systems implementation. It is a risky strategy, given the number of high profile national IT projects which have gone over budget, over time and have been blamed for everything from Stock Market crashes to Baggage Handling bottle necks.

Suffice to say, that the Leeds ALMOs have purchased Caseworks, and (unlike some previous implementations) we and our customers are determined to be both thorough and rapid. Our strategy is to conduct a really focussed two week workshop, where 12 of us will practically live together, a bit like Big Brother. Not really, but my colleague and I are going to rent hotel rooms for a couple of weeks, and a meeting room is booked. The challenge is to do in 2 weeks, a process which has taken others months – and to do it properly. We plan to liaise and implement customisation changes with a 24 hour turnaround, and in the process our Leeds team will become experts in Caseworks and HUBSolutions will become experts on Leeds ASB procedures. The challenge is greater because there are effectively four customers – three ALMOs and a TMO are already working very differently - so the system is going to have to be very flexible indeed. Doubtless we will be rushing out system enhancements to meet their needs, and this is part of the challenge.

Today was very much Day One, the installation of an empty un-customised database on the Leeds servers. It all went smoothly, but the previous day where I was preparing the database was really the first stress point. Having earlier told Leeds that the Property Gazetteer they provided looked fine, I found it was in the new NLPG format which messed up my import routines. It took a half day to re-write the code; then it became obvious that despite the presence of 350,000 properties in the file, there were many others missing. A panic email to Leslie, my Leeds contact, and hopefully we are on our way to resolving this - the first of many problems I expect.

Read the next episode on Tuesday – I am hoping to get some guest contributions next week!

All over the country

Sorry, there have been no blog entries for a week!

Periodically, demands on development go through the roof and this is definitely one of those times. Rather than bemoan the workload, I thought I would use the opportunity to experiment with Google Maps, and create an annotated map which showed how we are being torn in all directions.

This map took literally 5 minutes to knock up (I dont have any more time than that), and hopefully it will be of interest to readers of the Blog, both to re-assure that they are not forgotten, but also to see what is happening elsewhere, and why we are a bit over stretched.

Click on the points to find out what we are doing and where. Sorry, you will have to magnify the map a bit (I havent mastered that control), and when you click on a point the bubble, is a bit on the big side (I dont think there is any answer to that).


View Larger Map

You asked, we delivered

I got this slogan from a visit to South Tyneside Town Hall, and it did seem pretty appropriate to any public service organisation, or one which seeks to serve its customers. Now that we have set up User Groups, it is encumbant upon us to deliver the changes requested.


One of the best ideas (but most complex) , came from Sefton Council when they attended the Northern User Group. It appealed to me because it was obviously bourne out of frustration familiar to all of us, of trying to do work on something, and being interrupted by the telephone. This user wanted a way to (1) do a quick search while in an existing case (2) have an easy way of getting back to the original case when he put the phone down.


We have done just that, which will be released in a new version with new-look buttons. Quick Search, is itself, a snappy utility which has been on the Menu for a month now, and lets you key in anything meaningful - Reference, Name, Address, key word like "ASBO" and shows you a case or a list. This is now on every page, with a built-in memory, which allows you to click a "Retrieve" button. Here are the pictures:-

(click picture to see enlarged)

Jim'll Fix It!

Sometimes working on Caseworks feels like doing an episode of Jim'll Fix It. Clearly some users also think like this. This is an email I received this afternoon from one of our users, who manages team leaders. That means she was not able to see Team Statistics for the end users. This is how she worded the request for an enhancement:-

"Can you fix it for me please, that i have access to cases for all teams"

This was the 10 minute fix (on my Test Database needless to say!)

(Click on the image to enlarge)

A sighting of The Gonk

Today, was one of the better days for Team Caseworks.

We actually had a sighting of the extremely rare Gonk - a creature, as far as we know, which lives only in captivity in Solihull. Here is a picture of it, with two of its keepers. Sarah, on the left, is our "CASEWORKER" prize winner for her outstanding piece of photography of The Gonk trying to use Caseworks. She is now the proud owner of an IPod Nano.






The runner up prize of chocolates went to Pat Brown's Team for its outstanding literary contribution to the Caseworks publicity material.

See the rest of the photos in our photo gallery by clicking here

We did do some work as well! The day was an opportunity for a delegation from Hackney Council to see how ASB is handled in the Midlands, and it was also an opportunity for Krish and myself to show off the new ASB Data Capture tool, which Solihull are considering. Finally we talked about a number of new developments - does anyone else need a page on Parenting Orders?

Leave Your Comment

Its good fun to write this blog, but even more fun to know that someone is reading it!

"Comments", is a small link at the bottom of every blog, and until last week, no one had noticed it, or thought of using it. The Gonk changed all that, and some readers lost their inhibitions and let loose with their opinion.

Now I know what turns you on!

Keep it up! Just in case you haven't noticed the comments, here are the ones left for the Gonk.

The Gonk has won!

At last January is over, and our photo competition has closed. The winner? A Christmas party entry (I suspect) from Solihull which made us all laugh. Just as funny, though not strictly within the scope of that competition was the poem submitted by a whole team of staff in Solihull. Both the poem and photo are included here. I dont think there is any more I can add to this, except to say that the iPod Nano has been bought and will be presented to the winner shortly. The poem will qualify for a runner-up prize. Watch this space to satisfy yourself that the winners are real people, and the whole thing is not just a publicity stunt.

The Poem
"Keepin it real with the 'HUB' by perpetrating the perp!!

Our 'Omage' to the Hub


B 4 the Hub what did we do?

Most of us really had no clue

Now the HUB has come our way

We are organised every day!!

WE LOVE YOU HUBxxx



(listen long enough and you'll hear the applause from us all!!)

Warm welcome on a cold day

At the start of February in Hamilton in Scotland, the wind is very strong and the temperature very low. This was the venue for our first Scottish User Group, but despite the climate we and South Lanarkshire's guests received a warm welcome in their brand new Whitehill Neighbourhood Centre.

Our formal write up is in the Scottish News Page(http://www.hubsolutions.co.uk/Scotland/page72/page72.html).
The pictures of the Centre and the Meeting are more interesting, in our picture gallery (http://www.hubsolutions.co.uk/photos/scotusergroup1.html).

I try to find an informal angle on things for the blog. Two things to mention. One, is nothing to do with our Company, but the Centre really is one of the best one-stop-shops I have seen, and should be better publicised. Hopefully our picture gallery will do that.

Secondly, there are always good ideas which arise spontaneously and completely unexpectedly at these meetings. At the Northern User Group, a delegate from Sefton came up with the idea of quick search from any view page, so that you could nip into another case to deal with a phone call and then return to the original case. We are working on that. At this meeting, Pat Kelly from North Ayrshire, seeing the User Divert facility for diverting your caseload to another user when going on holiday, suggested that you may prefer to divert the caseload to the whole team, randomly allocating the cases out. Nice idea, we will definitely take on board.

QUICK fix for Lewisham

I’m sure all of you are aware that we are a small company, and as such at HUB we need to all pull together to get the job done – its not possible to refer the problem to another department, there isn’t one.

As such even though most of my job is people facing; training staff, engaging in consultancy and doing all of the correspondence and documentation that surrounds this, when someone has a technical problem and I can help, I chip in rather than passing it along to the techies who already have their hands full. Hopefully this also results in the customer getting their problem solved a little faster.

So when yesterday I had an email from a manager at Lewisham saying that despite their best efforts they could not get two of their users into Caseworks I felt like I should see what I could to resolve the problem – only thing was I also had to leave to catch a flight to Scotland (N Ayrshire now and then the user group on Friday). Half an hour before I had to leave, seemed like just enough time.

Turned out the Server and Caseworks had got out of step so the manager at Lewisham was having little success changing their users password (if anyone else out there has experienced this it’s something that becomes less likely with the latest versions of Caseworks). So I logged in and refreshed the users recreating their logins on the server and checking they now worked before dashing out the door.

I had this word of thanks from the manager, ‘You’re worth every penny they pay you!!!’

For obvious reasons I thought I should blog this, I wouldn’t want the boss to think he was paying me too much…….

Pushing the limits in Lanarkshire

It is always pleasing to have a customer who pushes the system to its limit. South Lanarkshire, is one of those whose output is prolific and ambition is sky high.

They virtually invented the Intelligence Module, collecting data from the fire brigade and bus companies.

In October, they became the first serious users of the Notify and Respond Module. It took 24 hours to load and index their 80,ooo records and already they are within a whisker of 90,000 records!

Now they are neck and neck with Glasgow City Council to be the first users of the mobile data capture tool.

In common with several customers, the number of links they have added to some cases is quite staggering. They have joined the "over 100 links club", which forced us to carry out a major re-write of part of the system in November to accellerate the display of these very long cases.

I am currently ugrading the South Lanarkshire system, to bring in this enhancement. I tested it by putting a stop clock on the system. The result? A 100+ link case which was taking 15 seconds to load is now loading in 2! Click on the clock to see something almost as amazing

North of the Border

So far this Blog has focussed on our relations with customers in England. However, we have many customers north of the border. This week will end with our Scottish User Group, so I am dedicating a few entries to what is going on up there.


All the Scottish customers are pushing the boundaries of the system in different directions. Frankly they are pushing us pretty hard, and none more so than North Ayrshire.

It is the end of another weekend in which I have spent a significant chunk of time further upgrading and updating the North Ayrshire Test system. This West Coast Council has gone through every single screen, re-customising each to suit their requirements in a way never attempted by any other customer.

For all customers, there are spin-off benefits; the system is now more customisable than ever before, with, for example, the ability to limit the items in pick lists on specific screens to ensure that no out-of-context entries are every shown. They have also introduced auto-calculation of NOSP/NOP and ABC/UBN end dates. The reports facility now includes auto-filter lists as well as pivot tables. The most recent change has been an extension of the Key Performance Indicator facility, to use it to monitor the timliness of repeat contacts with complainants.

For Scottish customers, there is the benefit of completely new screens, which fit in with Scottish Law. How about this example - the top half of the SSST screen. SSST, for southerners stands for Short Scottish Secure Tenancy. (Click the picture for enlarged version)

Late night workout in Newcastle

Well, not quite Newcastle - South Tyneside to be precise - and nothing to do with Kevin Keegan or Northern Rock (these spurious references are just to get our Google rating up!). No, Thursday night was a late night for the ASB Team in South Shields, updating thousands of Caseworks Case Records, to categorise those which are the responsibilty of the newly formed Housing ALMO.

We got an urgent call on Thursday lunch time for assistance in updating the "Domain" of all their cases. We agreed if they emailed lists of references, we would bulk update the cases on the SQL Server Database. At one point in the afternoon, lists were coming in from four different sources every half hour, and they carried on working on it until nearly 8pm. In the end, their email system gave up the ghost and they read the numbers out over the phone!

The panic didn't end there. When I logged in the next morning, three more emails were awaiting me! At lunch time, we had to do an out-of-schedule refresh of all their reports, so that they could be presented to an important Council Meeting. I used to work for a London Council, and well know the feeling of turning up, somewhat unprepared for a scrutiny meeting with figures hurredly put together just 10 minutes earlier. Andy, the South Tyneside manager in this unenviable position, seemed truly relieved and grateful for our input, enough for me to text him a later update on the figures an hour later.

Word from the East

I am sure many readers of this Blog, will remember Zareena, our trainer and implementer. Several people have asked me where she is.

Well she is still working for us, part time, but from her new home in Saudi Arabia - the wonders of Broadband and Voice Over IP phones! Her most recent achievement was liaising with Hackney Council, a process which has led to discussions of a new consultancy and training contract.

However, she has not been heard of since before Christmas, having taken time off to have a baby. I am sure everyone will be happy to hear that mother and baby boy are well. This is an email I received from her yesterday.

Re: The Caseworker
This emails a month late, but
I wanted to let you know its
great!

Who won the
ipod?

Zareena

Who indeed? - wait until the closing date on 25th January, to find out!

A life saver?

The problem with our new User Review page on Caseworks, is it can put staff under a lot of pressure to be seen to be using the system. So imagine the problem at 16:20 on a Friday evening if you haven't logged in for a while and as a result, you cannot even remember your password, and your manager has a way of checking up on you.

I think this is what prompted an email from a user titled S.O.S - Please re-set my password. I was working on something else, but could not miss the implied urgency in this one! A small job to reset the password and email it to the user. The response made me smile, and a nice way to end a stressful week:-

Peter,
That's quick!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you for saving my life.

If anyone out there hasn't seen the User Review page, for managers, and is wondering what I am talking about, this is it.

Arlene goes West....

.....well as far as Harrow-on-the-Hill.

London Borough of Harrow staff have received training and are now up and running with Caseworks. Jas Baddhan praised the quality of the training delivered by HUBSolutions, which she said, had enabled the staff to immediatley get to work on updating and monitoring of their racial harrassment cases.

Job Share needn't be a hassle

I have just completed an interesting exchange of correspondence with Jackie - one of our users in Enfield - who is a manager with job share staff. She did not understand how JobShare worked in Caseworks, so I doubt if she is alone.

We introduced the ability to define a job share partner in the Usr Profile, last year, but didn't publicise it much. When you select a Job Share Partner, the system will create a new account for the job share couple, but each user will retain and use their separate accounts. However, all their cases and alerts are automatically transferred to the new job share account. When they log in, and view My Stats or My Caseload, they are both redirected to the joint account. This arrangement allows each user to be separately accountable, whilst they work on the same caseload. My user, Jackie, sees her staff as a single job-share entity on her Team Stats, as she should.

Her response to my various emails:-

"They SHARE as in case load. When you know how the system works it is easy!
I understand now
thank you
jackie"

A day doing reports

I frequently get invited to do a day's training on Reporting, and normally it ends up being a free-for-all dicussion of what reports are possible and what formats can be created. Friday at Enfield was no exception.

After a normal training session in the morning, the afternoon was spent taking their existing reports to pieces, reformatting them and interpreting the result. The last of these is always the bit I find the most interesting.

Enfield were interested in the profile of their complainants, so together we created a number of sheets which looked at the Gender, Age and Race breakdown of their complainants compared to the Incident Type being reported. No-one else has done exactly this so I found the results interesting. We spend some time wondering why older people wer

e more likely to report Animal Nuisance and younger people were more likely to report Domestic Violence. The Race and Gender charts also showed large variations between categories.


Maybe other customers would be interested to see what happens when you "normalise" the stats by taking out the "unknown" and plotting a graph of percentages. This is it.
(Click on the image for an enlarged version)

New Fields for Correspondence

Its always pleasing to get positive feedback.

Nic from Portsmouth City Council, asked if we could add several new fields to
the Correspondence facility. Good ideas actually. Currently the Correspondence
on Caseworks normally sends the Correspondence from the "Case Owner". What if
some letters are sent by another user - perhaps the manager - to whom all
replies should be sent? The sender needs to show as the name, address and
designation of the user creating the correspondence record. A further
refinement is to be able to embed "Your Reference" in the letter.

This was not as simple as it sounds, because the user creating the
correspondence, may not previously have been any part of the case or person to
which the correspondence was attached. It needed, yet another data merge
operation, picking up the current user. Furthermore, upgrading one tiny part
of the system, without a full upgrade is always tricky. Anyway, the result
was worth the effort.

Feedback from Nic:-

Hi Peter

Those changes work wonderfully - thank you very much.

Nic

Welcome to the Caseworks Blog

Welcome to the new Caseworks Blog. This is the next phase in the HUBSolutions
Interactive Programme. It is for those of us who are developing the system or
on the road liaising with users, to let everyone know what is going on. Quite
literally, no week goes by without something new being developed for some
customer, so this will be the place to keep bang up to date.

We can update this blog by emailing it, or sending a text. We can upload
photos and screen shots people might be interested in.

If you work with Caseworks, but do not work for HUBSolutions, and would like
to add your achievements to this blog, email one of our team and we will
invite you to be a contributor.