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.