Challenge for Change 

Making your housing service better 

 Up for a challenge? Want to see a change?

The Challenge for Change Team is keen to make sure that it lives up to its commitment to provide clear accountability for all Customers, the Sheffield Homes Board and the Council.  Our role is to scrutinise particular areas of the housing service and to identify improvements that will benefit customers whilst also help to improve the performance and cost efficiency of services delivered.

This means that we have a formal terms of reference approved by the Council and Sheffield Homes allowing us to request internal information, schedule reality checking activities and compare our finding against other housing organisations.

Challenge for Change currently receives mentoring support and has a dedicated Sheffield Homes officer to help make sure we can access the information we need.

We would like to give you a brief summary to keep you informed about what we have been doing since we were recruited, in June 2011.

July 2011

The first meeting of the Challenge for Change Team took place in July bringing the team together for the first time. This session provided an induction to the Challenger role and we looked how we should work together to suit all members.

August 2011

During the holiday period the team attended a ‘Meet and Greet’ session with officers of Sheffield Homes, Sheffield City Council and Councillor Harry Harpham.

September 2011

The Challenge for Change Team started considering the first topic for Scrutiny and looked at Sheffield Homes Performance Information, Customer Satisfaction, preferences of representatives put forward by the Community Engagement Partnership Group and as we are required to do, any preferred topics that the Sheffield Homes Board is keen to be subject of Resident Scrutiny.

We considered topics initially during a meeting where we looked at what the priorities should be so that we could demonstrate that we had the best interests of all Customers in mind. This took a lot of thinking about and we talked more about this at our first Team-Building event. During our meeting at the end of September 2011, we were pleased to be able to formalise our decision to look at Management of Complaints.

Our reasons for choosing this topic included:

• Complaints being an area that could affect any customer of the service
• Customer Satisfaction with Complaints is fairly low compared to other areas of the Service
• Complaints is an important area for the National Housing Standards and one where we can examine how well the service meets the new requirements
• Complaints are an area where there are many options to talk to other organisations and compare the service
• Sheffield Homes is currently conducting an internal Service Review and Challengers felt it would be a good time to see the differences in recommendations between an internal and Challenger-led Review
• Much can be learned from Complaints about other areas of the service and the Challenger Team felt it would help to give a good understanding of other areas to look at in the future
• Complaints is an area of expertise for some members of the Challenge Team where learning from one another can be maximised and help to build team relationships

September has been a fruitful month for the Challenge for Change Team and once our topic was decided we were able to choose a Project Manager, start planning the project and formally request information from Sheffield Homes.

Even more, the Challenge for Change Team has negotiated how the Planning and Performance Team, and, TPAS our Independent Mentor will support it.

Further updates……………

Challenge for Change is hopeful that in the New Year the work of our first project ‘Project One’, will be near completion and we commit to providing you with clear details of this at that point.