Cricklewood Homeless Concern Case Study

Strategic to Operational Planning

The Organisation

Cricklewood Homeless Concern (CHC) works with vulnerable people in Cricklewood and the wider London area to enable them to live independently whilst being fully integrated into the community. CHC supports those who are not able to access mainstream services and aims to become a centre of excellence for social inclusion and civic renewal.

The Need

Following the launch of a new Business Strategy and the opening of a new building in 2009, CHC wanted to develop detailed action plans for the coming year. One of CHC’s priorities was to plan the changes required to provide a seamless service to customers that met mutual needs and expectations and made best use of CHC resources. Over the following 6 months, CHC aimed to ensure that:

Everyone at CHC understands what everyone else does
Each person at CHC sees themselves as part of one CHC i.e. each of them can see a clear connection between their daily work, that of their colleagues, and the wider mission, vision and values of CHC
CHC works together as a seamless team providing tailored support for each customer’s journey
Customer expectations of CHC and CHC’s expectations of its customers are being met more quickly and efficiently than by using the existing service models.

What We Did

CHC commissioned Jacqueline of J Hill Associates to work with them in designing and delivering a staff away-day that would help them plan for change. Jacqueline facilitated a meeting with Danny Maher, Chief Executive, and his senior managers at which they identified what they wanted to be different as a result of the away-day, from which the following objectives were identified:

Create a compelling and shared picture of the desired CHC customer journey
Identify what CHC needs to do and stop doing to turn that picture into reality
Get to know each other better and to have fun working together.

Jacqueline developed a draft agenda for the away-day with detailed session designs which were reviewed by Danny and his team. The agenda evolved and a clear communication sent to staff about the content of the day and their participation.

The day was introduced by Anthony Alexander, Chair of the trustees. Danny and the management team outlined the context in which change needed to happen and participants were invited to highlight the organisation’s key strengths and to debate their target customer groups. Participants then worked in small groups to develop pictures of the desired customer journey, which they then presented and debated, enabling a consensus view to be reached. The next session concentrated on what needed to change within CHC to enable the desired customer journey to be implemented. The participants prioritised the changes and clear ‘projects’ emerged. Each project was allocated a lead ‘owner’ from the management team and Jacqueline introduced a practical tool for building cross-team working groups to implement them. The away day was then evaluated using a process that Jacqueline had designed and which included a review in six months’ time to measure the medium term impact.

Benefits

A compelling and shared picture of the desired CHC customer journey
A clear set of projects, owned by senior management members, and commitments to develop these plans further with staff involvement
Members from different teams were able to exchange experiences and views, promoting greater understanding across CHC
Participants reported that the away day objectives were either fully met or exceeded with one commenting that they’d like more time to gain a fuller picture of what other staff did
The evaluation gave participants the opportunity to identify and evaluate their own objectives for the day - the majority of these objectives were either fully met or exceeded with one reflecting that they would be better able to comment once the changes were being implemented
The external facilitator brought experience of designing and communicating similar events
Using an external facilitator enabled the CEO and managers to participate whilst retaining ownership of the overall process.

Participant comments included:

“The facilitator brought fun ... which opened up the ability to communicate what we do not do well.”

“Fabulous day. Great to experience that all of CHC want to see it develop and grow, keeping customers central to all changes.”

“We need (events like these) at least once a year.”

“Jacqueline was able to help us reflect on what we do.”

Danny Maher, Chief Executive at CHC commented “Jacqueline ensured excellent preparation and planning and demonstrated an ability to adapt to the direction staff wanted to take.”

Jacqueline was asked back in 2012 to facilitate a board away day, after which Danny added “Really good to see you today and thank you for enabling the great buzz amongst the group. The last time you facilitated an event for us, one of the targets that day was for us to develop a Community Engagement strategy and in February this year we heard the news that we had been awarded £1.67 million (£2.2m including matched borough funding). So you must be doing something right! I hope to email you in a year telling you how we have managed to reach all of the targets we have set ourselves today.”

Cricklewood Homeless Concern can be found at www.chc.org.uk

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