Category: Case Study
Oct 12, 2021
Rose Road Association is a well-established charity based in Hampshire, providing a variety of care services to children and young adults with multiple and complex disabilities, as well as their families. These services include respite care, domiciliary care, community outreach work, parent and carer advice lines and play-schemes.
Providing such a range of services means that Rose Road has to use a number of different business processes and systems in order to carry out the work that is required in order to provide the high standard care that they pride themselves on. It also means that Rose Road has to handle large quantities of sensitive data, much of which needs to be very accurate and accessible in a timely manner in order to safeguard the welfare of both service users and staff.
Due to the way that Rose Road has grown over the years and new services have been added to what is offered, it has meant that different business process and a variety of digital systems have been implemented into the organisation. There has never been a digital strategy nor has there been any integration of any of the systems or processes utilised. This has led to a number of silos within departments and inefficient ways of working being introduced.
In 2021, Rose Road Association engaged Futurum Consulting to help them begin a digital transformation journey and to start building a long-term digital strategy. This engagement started with a Discovery Project.
“Engaging Futurum Consulting to lead on the initial discovery work for our digital transformation project was the best decision we could have made”
The primary objective of the discovery project was to do a deep-dive into the way that the organisation operates, the processes that staff follow, the data that is captured, where it comes from, what its destination and purpose are, and to identify any risks. The secondary objectives were to analyse the processes and identify areas of inefficiency, and to assess the existing digital technology in use as to its suitability, where it could be improved and where digital technology could be introduced in order to make a positive difference and add value to the service users, the staff or the organisation as a whole.
The approach that Futurum Consulting adopted for this discovery project was to conduct a number of discovery workshops with staff from each department, followed by job observations with individual staff members. This was followed by a number of pieces of research and assessment.
“The report was succinct, relevant, clear and did not use jargon or tech language that would have left us confused”
The outcome of this was a comprehensive report of findings and recommendations in plain-English with no technological jargon, because it was important that the audience of the report was able to understand it and act upon the recommendations.
Speaking of the project, Rose Road CEO, Juno Hollyhock, said:
“Engaging Futurum Consulting to lead on the initial discovery work for our digital transformation project was the best decision we could have made. Our internal IT knowledge is sparse and we have a wide range of disconnected tech solutions that we are not using to their full capacity. This has led to disorganised processing with a high error rate.
Futurum worked hard to understand the nature of our business in-depth and to understand the organic processes that had led to our current position. They asked intelligent questions and prompted us to think more creatively about what we needed our systems to do for us both internally and externally.
Futurum worked with us to identify critical factors in our processing that even we were unaware of and have produced a prioritised strategy that addresses our needs in a timely way, will have immediate staff and user-journey impact and will make the most of what we already have whilst recognising the need for some investment and upgrading. Alongside this we can see that there will be a reduction in error rates, an increase in efficiency and, eventually, a financial benefit.
I was concerned that the final report would be dense, lengthy and hard to translate into a workable roadmap but that was not the case at all. The report was succinct, relevant, clear and did not use jargon or tech language that would have left us confused.”
Futurum Consulting is an award-winning consultancy practice that specialises in helping SME’s and Charities to operate more efficiently and get best use of their resources, whether that be digital technology, human resources or often both. Futurum helps clients to ensure that all processes they undertake add value to their customers or staff and ultimately to their financial sustainability.
Services that Futurum Consulting offers include digital transformation projects, business process reviews, system integrations, business process automations and solution sourcing and selection projects.
Futurum is lead by founder, Andrew Longland, who has a wealth of experience across both commercial and charity sectors and has a passion for helping charities to achieve more with the limited resources that they have.
Speaking of the Rose Road engagement, Andrew commented:
“Undertaking this project for Rose Road has been an absolute pleasure. As an organisation, they offer such a great service to the young people that the care for. The staff are so passionate about what they do. Projects like this give you a real sense of pride that you’re adding value to an organisation that other people really rely upon.
I’m looking forward to continuing our relationship with Rose Road as they now start to implement many of the recommendations we made in our report.”