How We Saved One Housing Association £720,000 Per Year & Cut End-To-End Void Times By 66%

If you work in housing, I’m going to show you a counterintuitive way of thinking about how to design and manage your voids system that will get you dramatic results. 

This is a system that has been used in multiple housing associations and local authorities, awards have been won using this system and it’s in use by Europe’s largest housing association.

Typically, it delivers a profound reduction in the time to turn around a housing void, from months in some cases to a week. In this case it took up to 85 days to turn around a housing void. After our intervention that went down to 28 days.

Further there was a saving of £720,000 annually.

Three Profound Questions For Change

Let’s start by looking at the problem with how housing voids are designed. And to do this we have to start by asking three simple yet challenging questions – what we should change, then what to change to and finally how to cause the change?

In most cases leaders don’t know how to answer these questions, typically as a result they will spend money on IT or additional resources without understanding the real issue. 

It’s a bit like trying to make your car go faster by adding a new paint job, it looks like changes are taking place, but it doesn’t affect the outcome you’re trying to achieve.

Study First

So, Step 1 is always to study the system with the leaders and the people who do the work to learn what to change and to see the consequences of the current design.  That way they can decide what to change to and shift their perspective on how to design and manage work better. 

We start by looking at performance on the ground, this leads us to the processes and policies at work and ultimately then takes us to the logic or thinking behind the design. 

E.g. - How leaders think – creates a system of work – that delivers either a good or a bad performance. 

Unfortunately, most leaders have been taught to think about service design as if it’s a 1900s factory, it’s a productivity and accountancy-based logic.

Leaders think: 

• Always keep the tradesmen busy.
• Set them targets and service standards to motivate them to get the work done on time. 
• Functionalise the work. 

NOTE – HOUSING VOIDS MIMICS A PROJECT SYSTEM, WE HAVE A COMPLETE GUIDE FOR HOW TO STUDY PROJECTS.

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Consequences Of The Current Design 

The consequences of this thinking impacted delivery negatively, for example:

Lots of houses were released to the tradesmen at the same time meaning that they’d choose the easier houses to fix to hit their service standards. This meant that the difficult houses started to back up and end to end times to refurbish a house took longer and longer. 

Also, to keep the men busy, they were sent to do work on houses, again in the wrong sequence, yet again the wrong house was being done at the wrong time and it introduced a huge amount of multi-tasking into the system. 

Every house was required to be refurbished to a minimum standard, but this didn’t consider what the customer wanted, in many cases we learned that the customer didn’t like the way the house was presented and redecorated. Meaning money was wasted over specifying what needed to be done.  

Many of the difficult houses would be side-lined, taking months, sometimes years, to be brought back into use. And as I’m sure you know the longer a house lies derelict the more it erodes or is vandalised, and it takes longer to fix. 

There was no real priority rule for the order in which houses should be done, as such priorities changed frequently based on who shouted loudest.

What To Change 

Studying the work allows us to make the current work design transparent meaning we can describe the rules of the current system and allow us to answer what should we change question e.g. :

1. Release lots of houses at the time and flood the tradesmen with work. 
2. Work on the easiest houses first. 
3. Work on any house you can irrespective of the order it SHOULD be worked on, as long as you’re busy. 
4. If you get blocked on a house, stop, and go on to the next one. 
5. The priority rule for what houses to be refurbished changes all the time. 
6. Leave the houses that will fail the service standard anyway till the end. 
7. Have every single house refurbished to the same standard. 
8. Use measures of how busy the tradesmen are.

These rules are responsible for high costs and 85 days to deliver a house.

The Next Question For A Leader To Answer Is What To Change To

If you think about it is easy, the current rules illuminate what we should do differently BUT you’ll now see why I said it was counterintuitive.

1. Rule 1: Dramatically reduce the number of houses that can be worked on so that tradesmen must work on the right house at the right time.
2. Rule 2: Release the houses in the correct order, irrespective of whether they are difficult or easy to fix, but only release a house to a tradesman when they have everything needed to work on the house.
3. Rule 3: Minimise interruptions for the tradesmen, keep the focused on finishing the house they are working on, one priority rule 1st in 1st out. 
4. Rule 4: Manage capacity by making sure that all houses being worked on are visible on a wall in the council, the job of the leader is to immediately help a tradesman who is blocked.
5. Rule 5: Meet the customer of the house and agree how THEY want it decorated and handed over, build a clear definition of done for the tradesmen.
6. Rule 6: Stop using measures of productivity, use customer measures of right first time and end to end time to deliver a house.
7. Rule 7: The only tradesmen who should be kept busy always is the one who is the most constrained resource or has the most amount to do in the house.  

So now we know what to change to but before we could start any change, we had to decide how to cause the change.  

How To Cause The Change

Here There Are Several Options: 

1. Run an experiment or just change the whole thing? That depends on risk and how broken the current system is. I’ve had cases where an organisation was going bust, we didn’t have time to run an experiment, we just did what we called direct action – just change it!
2. The second part of this question all forces us to think about how we get people to understand and agree to the new design. After-all if you’re a middle manager or a tradesman you may have been working according to the old rules imagine some consultant coming in and just telling you that tomorrow you should forget trying to hit your target and instead just do the house to the end. It wouldn’t go down well.

Here is another area mismanaged by leaders and consulting firms: they either try a rational intervention (here’s a powerpoint presentation, read it and do what it says) or coercion (do this because I say so). Neither works well or long term because there is no shift in perspective for those who need to change. 

Instead, we use normative design, we take the leaders and tradesmen to ‘dig up and see’ the current design and the consequences for them and the customer and have them co create the new design. Militant workers become superstars; jaded managers become top class leaders as they are given a new purpose which is to do the right thing for the customer. 

Now we have a way to cause the change, in this case an experiment combined with normative design. 

And just look at the results... 

1. Saving of £720,000 annually 
2. Housing Voids time reduced by 66% 

And a great comment from the union -

‘It’s great to have you here, it’s the best thing we’ve seen in years.’

The core message in this case is that change starts with study, learning how work is designed and managed is a leadership superpower. It means you can walk into any business or service and within days know EXACTLY what to change, what to do instead and how to get everyone on board.  Imagine that having complete confidence and knowledge that what you’re about to do is completely right and WILL deliver a result.

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Best, Stuart

#projectmanagement #housingassociations #socialhousing #housingvoids