Hackney Council wanted to drive innovation with a modern and flexible platform to manage their homes.

Hackney Council is a property manager ensuring the safety and maintenance of 30,000 houses throughout East London.

Hackney Council needed a simplified and flexible platform that would improve backend processes and enhance the experience of Hackney Council staff and residents. They wanted to provide a system that enabled residents to self-serve where possible and focus Housing Officers on spending time with vulnerable residents who needed more support.

A serious cyber-attack in 2020 forced Hackney Council to replace their Universal Housing system. The attack left staff unable to use the System which booked repairs, managed housing finances and administrated their lease and tenant holders. An emergency interim solution was put in place so that at least a stock of 30,000 homes could be properly managed. The Hackney Housing Services teams were most concerned about supporting vulnerable residents and wellbeing initiatives during the height of the pandemic.  

Hackney Council wanted to first focus on the leaseholder and tenant management system so that housing officers had more time to dedicate on the safety and welfare of its tenants. The engagement was divided into three workstreams: Repairs Hub, Finance and Managing, and Tenants and Leaseholders. Although separate workstreams, it all had to seamlessly work in unison to provide staff and residents with a positive experience.

Ensono worked with Hackney Council to create a first-rate experience for residents and staff
We are delivering a secure tenant and leaseholder management system “Manage my Home,” to free up time that for housing officers to spend with their tenants.

For consistency and data quality, Ensono worked with the Hackney Enterprise Architect to create program-level test and architecture strategies to ensure the three workstreams could collaborate effectively across data sets.

Hackney’s single source of truth
Working closely with departments across Hackney Council, our data engineers consolidated and restructured recovered data from Universal Housing and numerous interim spreadsheets, to produce one clean and reliable data set to migrate to the new system. This provides a single source of truth of Hackney person, tenure and property data alongside a powerful and easily searchable system.  

Future data quality was a strategic focus for Hackney, so we set up meetups for data, technical architecture and front-end development for Hackney and agency teams. This not only helped to shape the project as it progressed, but also provided a platform to communicate what had been achieved and promote knowledge sharing on how to maintain good practices.

Combined with the event driven architecture, the dependent systems now automatically sync data in real time to help maintain a clean database, ensuring data is designed for retrieval, and APIs are highly responsive.

Built with best practice, Hackney now have sustainable APIs that can be re-used to advance the modernization of other Council departments.

Getting it right for everyday users
Throughout the delivery, Ensono worked with a ‘supergroup’ of 11 Hackney Council housing officers who champion the views of the people at the heart of the system and provide regular user feedback on early designs.  Their invaluable collaboration has ensured that the platform is serving the needs of its day-to-day users.  

We are also working with the supergroup to document process flows for 62+ existing processes that will be rebuilt in the new system. In doing so, the joint team are challenging and identifying where efficiencies can be made, reducing the number of steps and actors and automating as many tasks as possible. This is an ongoing project, but so far, we have reduced the complexity of the processes by 40%.