The issue

After the pandemic, Soho Housing found itself at a crossroads.

Central London had changed. Not just in how it looked and moved, but in what it meant for the people who lived and worked there. For Soho Housing, this raised some tough questions about how to stay connected to its community while adapting to a city that was changing around it.

At the same time, the organisation was going through significant internal change, including higher than usual staff turnover, and the appointment of a new chief executive, Barbara Brownlee. Barbara stepped in during this massive period of disruption and was keen to lead Soho Housing into an exciting, but grounded, new chapter.

As its 50th anniversary approached, there was a shared recognition across the whole organisation, that they needed a refreshed vision – one with clarity, energy and purpose.

Our work focused on engaging directly with residents, staff and the board to articulate a renewed vision for Soho Housing and collectively shaping a practical pathway to bring that vision to life.

How did we fix it?

In true 4OC style, we believe the best way to delve into an organisation is through co-design and speaking to the people directly involved. Our specialist Housing team facilitated conversations with a broad range of stakeholders from Board level through to residents, adapting our approach to each group.

The phrase ‘Amazing place to live, amazing place to work’ had previously struck a chord with everyone, but on its own didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t grounded and embedded in strategic and day-to-day decision-making. At the core of a powerful vision is a common understanding of what an organisation constantly strives to achieve.

We engaged with Board members via one-to-one and group sessions, including founding members, which gave us unparalleled access to the organisation’s legacy and history. With Directors and Head of Departments, we spent time in one-to-one sessions to really understand the challenges Soho Housing has. We held group sessions for all 25 staff members, a resident workshop and worked with our partner, AKOU, who are supporting Soho Housing on a resident consultation project.

To support our qualitative work, we produced a number of deliverables including identifying key activities that would drive the vision and setting Design Principles to help how strategic and day-to-day decisions should be made.

What Soho thought...

“After Covid, we discussed new ways of working and how to get closer to our residents. Performance was not where it needed to be and it did not feel as if we were working as one organisation, all pulling in the same direction. The work with 4OC gave everyone the chance to have their say about Soho Housing and reflect on what was important and what to change.

4OC were great, they were flexible about how and when they met with everyone allowing maximum participation and seemed to understand the essence of Soho very quickly. This really helped us agree a vision and more importantly how we are going to work to achieve it.”

Barbara Brownlee, CEO

"... understood the essence of Soho very quickly"
The 4OC magic

With the guidance of the staff and residents, 4OC co-designed the new vision and strategic direction for Soho Housing. It built on the strong connection it has to its communities, residents, and the provision of affordable housing and excellent services in the heart of London. In doing this it acknowledged the role that commercial lettings and activities play in facilitating this vision.

‘We support the unique communities that sustain diversity in the heart of London by providing affordable homes, commercial lettings, and excellent services for our residents’.

We agreed a set of Design Principles to embed the vision through its work and decisions – Resident and Community Catalyst; Know and be close to our residents and communities; Social and commercial together; and, Improve, innovate and be nimble.

These principles helped to create a clear articulation of what working and living in the community will feel like. Into the future, they will continue to help to bind the organisation together and enable plans and activities to be aligned and purposeful.

I can’t get no…

 

The operational teams within Orbit knew that the way they were managing arrears needed improvement. The level of arrears was increasing, as was the cost of managing it, and more importantly, it was increasing the stress levels of their customers at the same time as Universal Credit was beginning to take effect. Something needed to change.

Orbit asked 4OC to have an initial conversation about how arrears was being managed, and we quickly developed an outcome-focused solution that would have an impact of the level of arrears, the cost of managing them, and customer experience.

...Satisfaction

work with Orbit’s arrears team and the wider organisation to co-design a new operating model. This process challenged preconceived assumptions and ways of working, pinned down the impacts of any proposed changes, and identified how any risks created could be mitigated and managed. This process ensured the solution designed was workable and that the teams felt ownership of the solution and new ways of working. It also ensures that any changes stuck.

Three years later, the model is still in place. Arrears have been reduced by 13% since 2019 and greater insight now enables action to be taken on arrears prevention. Customer satisfaction has consistently increased year-on-year.

Thoughts from Orbit

“The best thing about working with 4OC is that they are very operationally focused. They don’t bring off-the-shelf models—they designed ways of working tailored to our business that delivered the results we needed and have continued to improve our performance. They created great working relationships with the operational teams and helped them visualise how the changes would make a difference to their day job and help our customers, which it has.”

Louise Palese, Customer Operations Director

"[4OC] designed ways of working tailored to our business that delivered the results we needed"
For more...

If you’d like to find out more about how we delivered this work, or our approach supporting the sector, please check out our work in Housing or contact us at support@the4OC.com

The challenge

King’s College London is a world-class university and research-based institute in London. It is currently ranked as the seventh best university in the country.  

As a London based university, King’s College London have a lot of premium central London property. This requires innovation in the use and management of these spaces. To do this, the effective collaboration of the Estates and Facilities and the IT departments is essential.

Both departments recognised that there are dependencies across the teams that could be better understood and managed.  

The university invited 4OC to bring the two departments together and to help them to improve the way that they worked together.

Getting two departments to recognise the value of each other's work
The response

We used our experience of team development and the facilitation of sensitive discussions to work with the Estates and Facilities and IT teams across a series of workshops to help establish clear methods of working better together, which also aligned to the university’s wider V2029 mission. 

This included developing a set of principles which were then used on a ‘live’ project to develop a high-level plan of activities to ensure the timely but innovative and collaborative development of an Enhanced Learning Centre in the Macadam Centre.  

The outcome

The main purpose of the project was about collaborating effectively to develop an Enhanced Learning Centre. However, this project helped broker a better understanding between the IT and Estates and Facilities teams; both about each other and their roles. With this as a strong foundation, we built a number of solutions about how to practically work better together.

This is the most significant outcome as it extends beyond Enhanced Learning Centre. The impact is ongoing.

The challenge

Berkshire Primary Care Ltd (BPC Ltd) is a GP Federation which consists of all fifteen practices within Bracknell and Ascot Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG). The aim is for practices to work collaboratively to improve the services they are able to offer to patients and to strengthen the role of primary care within the wider NHS.

Ascot is a small town in east Berkshire with a growing population and a predicted increase in health care needs over the next 20 years. To prepare for these challenges, four local GP practices worked with the East Berkshire Clinical Commissioning Group, and their patient groups to develop the Ascot Plan, a town wide plan for primary care.  This involved bringing together the four practices, then located over five sites and to co-locate these in a transformational way into two sites within Ascot. Thus, the whole population of Ascot would have an integrated primary care service with two points of delivery.

4OC were asked to provide programme management support to the four practices, Berkshire Primary Care and the CCG, to ensure that the various tasks required to translate the Ascot Plan into operational reality were well co-ordinated. These included business case development, estates solution development and communications and engagement.  We were also asked to develop a new operating model for the four practices, which described how the practices would work together to deliver integrated clinical and back office support services.

£10 million of savings identified and delivered
The response

We agreed with the CCG and BPC that continuity and relationship building were both important components of this project, so we put in place an experienced Programme Director with experience of working in the local NHS and of developing new service models and estates solutions.

We started by reviewing the governance of the pre-existing project Steering Group and establishing clear terms of reference for the group.  We reviewed and streamlined the reports presented to the group and developed a project programme and risk and issues log.

Using the 4OC Stakeholder Mapping tool, we then conducted a stakeholder assessment and mapping to agree with whom we needed to be engaged, the appropriate forum and to what level of detail. We then ran a series of co-design Operating Model workshops and structured meetings with the Steering Group to define new ways of working which would both facilitate and get the most out of the transformation.

Our approach focused on informed, transparent decision making in the production of a model which takes into consideration the real constraints of working within the existing system.

The outcome

The primary output was an Operating Model, setting out the clinical service scope, a shared back office model and a preferred option for the distribution of clinical and administrative services across sites. The first shared back office appointment has now been made by two of the practices, and further joint appointments are planned.

We also developed a high level organisational model for the future delivery of Primary Care in Ascot, which was then incorporated into the local Primary Care Network.

We produced an Implementation Plan setting out how the transition will take place in an efficient and sustainable manner over the next 5-10 years, including a clear statement of the facilities and resources required for its delivery across two sites.

The challenge

MTVH identified a need to review their current finance systems used across the business to identify the existing finance workflows, systems and business requirements.

They recognised that rationalising the 20+ systems that they had in place and procuring new technology would allow them to optimise the organisation’s finance business process and drive transformational change in the delivery of service.

The organisation needed support in both capacity and approach to develop a set of collateral and a qualified list of solution providers in order to progress with a procurement exercise.

Getting all levels of the organisation to sign up to replacement technologies
The response

The 4OC approach to this task recognised the importance of undertaking a structured requirements gathering process, with the full involvement of the operational services who were users of the various finance team systems and processes, alongside a thorough engagement with the finance team members.

Through a series of workshops, interviews, and meetings we identified the main issues, drivers for change, and core business processes. We worked closely with management and staff from the finance and operational teams through a series of Value Chain workshops to establish the underlying business requirements, revised business processes and underlying challenges.

Based on the agreed assumptions around revised business process, an understanding of the work and dataflows and a documented set of business requirements and selection criteria, we generated a qualified list of suppliers to progress to the next phase of developing an IT solution for the finance team.

The outcome

The primary output was a recommendations report, which had been extensively reviewed and most importantly, agreed by staff at all levels across the organisation. An additional significant by-product of our approach was the identification of a requirement to address key points within the business processes in place within TVH operations and master data management in advance of embarking on any transition to a new solution.

In addition, Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing, the recently merged, significantly larger organisation managing 57,000 homes, has recently commissioned 4OC to use this same approach to requirements gathering, to begin the process of replacing their two existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions with a new, cloud-based, simple CRM-lite solution to be used by approximately 350 users.

The challenge

Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) has committed to a long-term transformation of services to maximise use of resources, drive efficiency and improve the overall offer to existing and future students of the University, aligning operating costs and service outputs with its long term aims. This represents a significant programme of change for the University that will impact students, faculties and professional services.   

4OC were engaged to help ARU set out the scope of the transformation programme.

Together, we developed a Vision for the transformed University and agreed a high-level operating model
The response

We worked with the leadership teams across the University to:  

  • Develop an agreed and commonly understood vision for a transformed University  
  • Co-design, gain a common understanding of and gain agreement on a set of Design principles that set the framework for engagement and how the programme would be delivered  
  • Develop, based on 4OC’s transformation and change methodologies, an ARU bespoke transformation approach 

Our financial analysts produced a baseline of the operational financial performance, from which we were measured the impact of subsequent operational change as part of a formalised transformation programme.  

We conducted intensive and structured stakeholder engagement sessions to share and capture ideas for transformational change, tactical operational improvements and financial savings. By creating a safe space for individuals to engage with one another, discuss their own experiences of the organisation and address questions that they may not otherwise have the opportunity to consider, we helped the teams to start to take ownership of the activities and outcomes in the programme. 

The outcome

Using our experience of the HE sector and delivering organisational wide transformation programmes, we developed a narrative that helped the leadership team understand what some of the consequences of moving to a new operating model could be and how those consequences could be managed.   

This project established the framework and tone for the broader transformation programme.  We worked with the Transformation Leadership Team (TLT) to develop a Vision for the transformed University and agree a high-level operating model supporting efficient and student focussed services, setting out the activities required to affect and embed the change that will drive efficiencies and yield sustainable financial benefits.   

We provided and shared a detailed Risk, Assumptions, Issues and Dependency log (RAID), which included mitigation strategies. This helped to solidify confidence in the programme amongst the people who will be affected.  

Finally, during the Handover and Closeout stage we reflected with the client on the process, illuminating lessons learned to build capacity that would inform future projects and change activities as the TLT moves forward with initiating and mobilising the Transformation Programme.

The challenge

The Finance Teams at the Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust (LPT) and at the University Hospitals of Leicester (UHL) were invited to work as pilot sites for the development and implementation of the NHS Improvement (NHSI) Finance Operating Model Project.  

NHS Improvement had identified the need to better understand the systems and processes within Trust Finance functions in order to: 

  • Identify opportunities for improvement for each Trust 
  • Develop a robust set of Key Performance Indicators, to be used in benchmarking and identification of the support needs of NHS Trusts as part of the NHS Model Hospital Programme 
  • Develop a high level ‘Target Operating Model’ describing the structure, systems and processes required to ensure optimal function of a hospital finance department 
£10 million of savings identified and delivered
The response

We put together a small team to support this project, with a combination of senior NHS financial, contracting and operational management experience and operational and finance management experience from other sectors.  

The detail included below relates to our work with the Leicestershire Partnership NHSFT (LPT), although we took a similar approach to the project with each of the two Trusts involved.  

The Trust nominated their acting Director of Finance to act as the project sponsor for this piece of work. At our initial meeting with her we identified that the Finance team had experienced a high degree of change and disruption in the recent past due to organisational mergers.  We designed our project involved maximising input from as many staff as possible across all teams in the finance function and encouraging their commitment to change. 

We started the project by involving 24  finance staff members in structured interviews and a number of workshops to develop a Value Chain Map for each finance function, identifying bottlenecks, delay and duplication within current processes and a number of potential ideas for improvement.  We also completed an Operational Health Check for the service, working with service users (budget holders) and the finance team, to identify what was working well and what areas needed attention across eight .  We then completed some data analysis and ran a series of workshops to validate potential process changes and solutions.

Finally we ran a 3 hour workshop for the entire finance team to share findings and to prioritise the service improvement projects. We also used this session to develop and test a simple approach to managing changes and to identify training and development needs. 

The outcome

Working in partnership with the two Trusts we devised a prioritised set of improvement plans for each Trust, which they have begun to implement. These include a redesigned Accounts Receivable process aimed at reducing debtor days and improving cashflow and a more consistent set of management accounts processes.  

We went on to identify opportunities to streamline financial systems, replacing manual workflow with electronic workflow, in particular for paper-heavy Accounts Payable processes and we also developed simple Key Performance Indicators to enable the Trusts to track progress.  

Finally, we shared an improvement toolkit, including straightforward tools for project management and process improvement. 

We used our findings from the work with Trusts to produce a high level finance function Operating Model and a set of Key Performance Indicators for NHSI to use in their Model Hospital programme.