Support provision type maintenance overview

The main emphasis of a tenancy support scheme is to provide service users with the opportunity to improve their quality of life, attaining a higher degree of independence and ultimately achieving tenancy sustainment. Whilst staff operating the scheme might not be able to provide specialist guidance on more complex issues, they will be fully aware of the broad range of expert services that are delivered through partner agencies and can therefore signpost service users to the most appropriate provider. Whilst the circumstances of each tenant might be unique, and therefore requiring a tailored programme of support, the topics encountered by housing officers can be broadly categorised as follows:

The service user is suffering with a disability e.g. full or partial loss of sight or hearing.
The service user has a learning difficulty and therefore requires assistance with completing forms or responding to related correspondence.
The service user suffers from mental health issues.
The service user is in need of emotional support or counselling.
The service user has been identified with a dependency on drugs or alcohol.
The service user is a victim of domestic violence.
A new customer that has been offered a tenancy requires help in setting up their first home.
The provision of financial advice around managing income and expenditure in order to balance the family budget.

For each discrete topic likely to be handled through the tenancy support scheme, a custom provision type can be created within Civica Cx Housing, with the intrinsic activities identified to achieve specific support aims linked through a structured task workflow. On launching a new support provision case, the relevant type can then be selected from the outset, steering how the case will be progressed. All support provision cases can be service level driven, controlled through the inclusion of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) within the overarching custom provision type. For each support provision type defined by the end user, there are three aspects of SLA compliance tracking available: amber warning period, follow-on escalation and target completion exceeded. SLA targets that are defined at provision type level must transcend the individual SLA targets for the related tasks, with robust system validation rules ensuring that proposed target completion dates are synchronised. Once an SLA indicator is reached, the system can be configured to dispatch an automatic alert to individual user accounts that are associated through the support provision case classification, notifying them of the situation. User accounts can be linked directly to the SLA notification process or by association through their membership of an allocated role.

When assigning a Service Level Agreement to a support provision type, it is possible to augment those operational boundaries with a custom priority weighting. Therefore, upon launching an associated case file and assigning the relevant priority - High, Medium, Low, etc. - the matching SLA for that priority is applied automatically; where no SLA exists with the same priority, an 'effective' record without an assigned priority weighting will be employed. Otherwise, the resulting case will be managed outside of any SLA operating boundaries.

The allocation of tasks to a provision type defines how the resulting support provision case will be progressed. Any number of discrete tasks can be linked to a support provision case, with a specific attribute governing whether each can appear more than once within the same execution plan. In structuring all the activities that are relevant to a support provision case, tasks can be added manually at the point of need, or they can be linked automatically by virtue of their existence within an associated workflow path. Dictated by the nature of the assigned tasks, dependencies can be configured between them to restrict the point at which related tasks are commenced.

Upon raising a support provision case, the ascribed ownership credentials are automatically transferred based on the rules assigned to the classification type, specifically one or more individual user accounts together with any additional role permissions. From an end user perspective, all assigned support provision cases can be viewed and progressed via the 'cases and tasks' Home pane, which is in essence a consolidated "to-do" list, displaying a status breakdown for each case in real time, and supported by drill-down functionality to facilitate case updates being applied on-the-fly.

Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of support provision type maintenance, including: