Challenges

Parkhead Housing Association shares the challenges they faced when trying to manage their governance, including conducting meetings, controlling risk, and tracking strategic objectives:

• Using a paper based system to organise meetings and track goals was tedious for the team.
• Constant administrative burden when printing and distributing meeting packs, with time and resources taken to plan meetings for boards and subcommittees costing between £27,000-£30,000 a year.
• Switching to a DIY electronic system was still time-consuming and clunky to use.
• Tracking strategic objectives was difficult with a lack of version control.

Time for change

When reviewing the cost of doing business for the organisation, Parkhead decided to look for a more efficient, functional and time-saving system for their board and subcommittees. Managing a secure section on the Parkhead website to collate board papers as an alternative to paper was still proving to be difficult for the team to use.

Matthew Reid, Corporate Services Manager at Parkhead Housing Association, shares the steps the organisation took in order to streamline their governance process.

“We conducted an in-depth review of our governance structure and engaged with an external consultant. We looked at several areas across the board and were looking to streamline a number of operations that were reduced to a number of subcommittees and meetings at the time. So, once we cut down on our subcommittees and the number of board meetings a year, we then needed to move to a more strategic, high-level way of reporting performance information, managing meetings and controlling risks for our organisation.”

The solution

After assessing their governance structure, Parkhead Housing made the decision to implement a system that would be secure, reliable and have everything in one place. The organisation adopted Governance and Risk Management solutions from OneAdvanced as a way to reduce time and resources that would have been spent by staff in the past.

Matthew said, “We first heard of OneAdvanced’s Governance and Risk Management solutions when we were at a housing conference in Scotland. We were on the search for a scorecard approach to performance information and a more manageable way to conduct meetings. We were also looking for a way to create a more in-depth and intuitive risk process. When researching various software providers, we discovered that the OneAdvanced product offered all three in one place, which made it easy for us to choose this solution.” 

Once Parkhead Housing implemented the full platform, Matthew shared how they personalised the system to best suit their approach to governance. “Initially, we went through a process of building the system up to meet our needs and customising it in terms of users, agendas and templates. Once we managed our meetings module, we added all our risk and performance information to the system, which proved to be a seamless and straightforward process.” 

Keeping in line with compliance and governance processes is crucial for any housing association. Parkhead Housing found that using a unique all-in-one system like OneAdvanced’s Governance and Risk platform allowed them to reduce the administrative burden of a paper-based system. 

OneAdvanced’s Governance and Risk platform overview

• Easy to use, highly intuitive software ensures adoption by the board.
• Last minute changes are easy to incorporate so packs are distributed earlier.
• Capture, evaluate and manage risks and opportunities of any type in one place and under a single flexible framework.
• Assign strategic objectives to specific owners and map to organisational themes and structure.
• Mitigations, controls and responses are all clearly captured separately from actions and future plans giving a better understanding of the current state and the target position.
• Clear and more transparent audit trails for risk registers.