The Client
Warwick District Council is based in Leamington Spa and owns and manages around 5500 rental properties, as well as having agreements with local registered social landlords to advertise properties through the Council run Choice Based Letting (CBL) system. ActiveH from MIS is the Council’s housing management system through which applications, properties and customers are managed, and HomeChoice is the Council’s bespoke CBL website.
The Challenge
To deliver responsive and planned support and development services for the CBL solution including bespoke apis and interfaces to ActiveH. The CBL website and supporting packages have been developed by the Council’s ICT team and have evolved to reflect policy changes over several years.
Locally hosted in a Council environment and with only remote access the support and development services reflect the need to be reactive to problems arising, as well as carrying out developments in a structured method within a 3 stage development/test/live environment.
The Solution
The discovery element of the project included reviews of Council supplied documentation on how the CBL system functions; time spent with the Council ICT team to review the underlying code; review of key functions and scenarios in a test environment; and sample development projects.
The planning element of the project included the set up and deployment of secure remote access; agreement on and implementation of back up and code storage procedures; agreed communication and reporting protocols; and project management processes.
The development element of the project differs for each event and is defined by the complexity of the requirement. Support tasks range from simple updates of html elements through to analysis of system errors. Development tasks include projects to reflects changes required by updates to letting policies, through to upgrades to reflect changes in ActiveH interfaces.
The choice of Emerald as supplier for this project reflects our experience working alongside other RSLs operating CBL solutions linked to ActiveH from MIS.
