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!