And so this is Christmas...

And so I approach my second Christmas (already!) since leaving the Keystone team. It’s six months since my ‘anniversary’ blog, and what a tumultuous six months it’s been. If the first part of the year was characterised by an apparently never-ending list of A-List celebrities shuffling off this mortal coil, the second half has seen Brexit, Trump, and the word ‘post-Truth’ becoming ‘word of the year’. To co-opt the old Chinese curse – we are certainly “living in interesting times”…

From a personal perspective, the truth and the facts have continued to play a major part in my daily life. They always have, and always will. When I’m not working on Keystone consultancy (more of that later), I’m either managing the books for my brother’s engineering firm, or performing a number of administrative roles, volunteering at my son’s athletics club. Coming from an IT background, I’ve found myself covering an increasing number of jobs at the club, from recording results at home matches, to managing the club web site, keeping on top of and publishing related statistics – and even becoming a qualified Field Official! All of these tasks have one thing in common – attention to precise, accurate detail. When it comes to reporting on athletics, the truth and the facts are top of the priorities – and an obsession with getting it right is a requisite skill!

Of course, that obsession is essential to success with social housing asset management too – a world where the allocation of multi-million pound budgets has a dependency on the accuracy of the data contained within, and the quality of the reporting produced by systems such as Keystone. With budgets squeezed, and assets being ‘sweated’ the importance of the role played by such systems has never been higher – a fact recognised by all of the clients I have worked with during 2016.

Apart from some occasional work with the likes of KSI and KRM, the majority of the work I am asked to carry out falls into three broad categories:

• Data Quality

• Sustainability Modelling

• Capital planning

Despite greater and greater focus on the latter two, you take your eye off the first item at your peril! Clearly, trying to build your models or capital programmes on shaky foundations is doomed to fail, so constant attention to data quality is essential. Many organisations quite rightly look to extend the use of Keystone to the widest possible user base – to get buy-in and ownership from people throughout the business, to avoid bottlenecks, or single points of failure. But this strategy always has to be set against the associated increased risk of data being poorly or incorrectly maintained or updated. Many an Asset Manager, having had their fingers burned by this, has re-centralised control of the system, only to then be overwhelmed with the job of keeping it up to date - emulating the Public Sector cycle of centralisation, de-centralisation, centralisation, de-centralisation…

Getting the balance right, being pragmatic, and putting the appropriate systems and processes in place can be very challenging – but it IS possible – I’ve seen it done!

When I’m not helping with the basic data quality challenge, then most of the time clients are asking for my help with the other two targets – getting a Sustainability Model in place, and working out a Capital Programme. I place them in that order, as logically that’s the order in which they should be tackled of course – but often the latter is too pressing a priority to wait for the former!

A number of Keystone users have come to me to help with setting up their Sustainability Model in the system, and I’ve evolved, I believe, a pretty good standard approach to this challenge. On the non-standard side, as I mentioned last time, one customer commissioned me to write a model outside of Keystone, because their needs were not met by the functionality provided within the system. I developed this using my Excel VBA skills – I still enjoy reverting to my days as a software developer on occasion!

And my Excel VBA experience has been massively extended over the past few months as a result of some work I’ve been carrying out with another long-standing Keystone user. In common with the customer who needed more than was possible using Keystone’s standard functionality for Sustainability, this customer needed something over and above to assist with their capital planning. They’d reviewed all of the standard functions, such as What-If Scenarios, Planned Works, and Planned Works Dataset, but none of these quite met the need. Even the new Forecast Smoothing function in v7.10 didn’t give them what they needed, and this has led to probably the most interesting piece of work I’ve done to date under the banner of Hewes Consulting.

Essentially, the client had already carried out some substantial Excel-based developed of their planning tool, allowing changes to proposed planned works to be immediately viewed graphically against budgets, with the final view being easily passed into a KGI for updating the programme. What was beyond even the most complex formulas in Excel (both from a complexity and performance perspective) was to achieve the level of Mode averaging, and linkage of related work items that they were looking for. So, I dived in, with some more VBA programming to achieve these aims – and the result is, I think, quite ground-breaking. This last aspect – the grouping of related works (e.g. if you’re setting the dates for the Roof Covering works, you want the system to automatically move other Roof-related works accordingly, taking into account the respective lifecycles) is something that has come up in discussion with Asset Managers a number times over the years, but this is the first time I believe anything has actually been implemented around Keystone.

As I mentioned in my last blog, this is the kind of work I really enjoy – working closely with a customer, combining our respective business and technical skills, to produce something that really solves a complex problem. It would be interesting to discuss this tool with other Keystone customers, to see whether it might be useful for a wider audience, so please do contact me if you’d like more details.

Well, I think I’ve kept you from your festivities for long enough! Thanks for reading right through to the end!

Have a lovely relaxing Christmas – and here’s to a truth-based, fact-centred 2017!