Programme & Departmental Services

Programme & Departmental ServicesAs well as helping deliver individual schemes (project services) we can help improve your efficiency and effectiveness when delivering programmes and managing departments. Examples are:

Interim management from Executive Director to Project Assistant

We can provide interim cover at a range of levels to plug any temporary gaps in your staffing resources or workload peaks or to cater for unusual or complex issues.

Development Agency Services for small HAs, ALMOs, LAs

We provide a full Development Agent/Project Management service for affordable housing providers who do not have their own internal Development team. We can also act as your Development Agent for a specific scheme if your existing team would be over-stretched if they took it on.

Design Briefs

As the authors of the NHF’s Standards & Quality in Development and the Housing Corporation/CABE’s Achieving Building for Life we have a particularly strong track record in producing Design Briefs.

We structure them in a way which is most helpful to the design team as well as Development staff and – crucially – housing management, maintenance and sales colleagues within the affordable housing provider.

Consultant Guides

What exactly do you expect from your design team and when? Letters of appointments and conditions of engagement give some indication. But it is very helpful to both the design team and the client if it is clear what information is required by whom, when and in what form.

Consultant Guides improve the client’s ability to manage the design team more efficiently, and more effectively.

Process analysis, maps, flowcharts, procedures & guidance

(see also Development procedures)

Reviewing how the Development team undertake their role can be invaluable, highlighting:

  • quick-fix ways of improving inter-departmental working relationships;
  • unnecessary bureaucracy;
  • ways of strengthening internal control;
  • how to get consultants and contractors to perform better.

Who benefits? Development staff, managers/directors and Board members.

The results can be in whatever form works best for you – visual, textual, or a mixture.

Departmental structure reviews

In changing times it is vitally important to organise teams in the most productive manner possible. We can offer an independent perspective based on our experience in the affordable housing sector coupled with our professional project management background.

Development Strategies

(see also Strategy, Policy & Research)

As the foundation for shaping your Development and Regeneration activities, it is important that the Development Strategy is clear, well structured and is useful at a day-to-day level. it should integrate with, and complement your Community Strategy and your Asset Management Strategy.

We believe these documents should be meaningful – and so will work with you to reduce the “warm words” and focus on measurable content.

Recent clients in this field
Newlon HT, Orbit Homes, Tower Hamlets Homes, Family HA (York)