By Nathan Thomas – Senior Business Analyst

Earlier this year, I was asked to lead on a project to improve how we manage introductory tenancies.

The problem

When someone becomes a council tenant, they start with a 12-month introductory period. At the end of those 12 months, their tenancy should automatically become secure and they should receive a confirmation letter. Due to the volume of cases and the number of manual steps involved, many tenants were going past the 12 months trial period without their tenancy being updated or receiving their letter.

The solution

We developed an automated process to fix this.

• Instead of waiting until 52 weeks had passed, we set the system to flag cases at 51 weeks, giving us time to process them.
• Every Monday, the automation runs, checks the BI report, and updates tenancies in NEC from “introductory” to “secure.”
• This automatically generates and sends the correct confirmation letter.

It may sound fairly straightforward, but it wasn’t due to a number of factors.

The challenges

The project took around 14 weeks from May to August, which was longer than expected. Along the way we hit several bumps:

• Rebuilding the solution – The original Foundry build couldn’t be used as-is and had to be redeveloped.
• API and token issues – Getting the right permissions and tokens in place took longer than planned.
• Communication gaps – Sometimes people were on leave or not present at stand-ups without notice, which slowed things down.
• Changing requirements – Extra tenancy codes were added partway through, increasing development time.
• Limited developer availability – If someone was away, we had to wait until they returned.
• Complexity– The service area wanted to include some functionality around the rent accounts. We explored this in detail by mapping out the process but agreed to park it due to the complexity of the actions.
• Desktop support – Some colleagues wanted to be more involved later in the process, so we had to bring them in mid-way.
• Testing failures – Scheduled tests often failed overnight; in hindsight, manual daytime testing would have been faster.
• Service account process – Changes to how service accounts were set up caused extra delays.
• Go-live delays – Multiple rescheduled go-live dates added to the frustration.

What did we learn?

Despite the setbacks, the solution is now live and working. Tenants are getting their secure tenancy updates and letters on time, without any manual intervention.

The project underlined some important lessons:

• Ask for help sooner rather than later.
• Communicate clearly about availability and changes.
• Test in a way that gives quick feedback.
• Be realistic, assess and park what can’t be delivered on time.

It wasn’t perfect, and it took longer than it should have. But the outcome is a process that saves time, reduces risk, and makes sure tenants get what they’re entitled to.

Quote from Jasmina Ahmed, Housing Officer.

“1. Multiple colleagues from DTS were involved who needed to action elements at different times which caused some delay as queries were resolved as we arrived at a particular point.

2. The process was more complex as this work included NEC housing API codes, BI report, service account and power automate etc which involved different colleagues.

In conclusion I think we did very well as this was working with a housing system, most of the DTS solutions for service requests are normally a totally new solution, e.g new ICT portal, what we did was improve a process in a different system, which I think presents additional challenges. “