Incommunities

Incommunities are a large social landlord with their head office in Bradford. With more than 20000 properties, 1000 staff and a turnover in excess of £60 million, Incommunities always have a large number of complex projects to deliver at any one time.

Lorraine O'Brien, Director of Improvement at Incommunities, was familiar with UIMPROVE from her time at Harvest Housing Group. As a result, in 2007 she commissioned the UIC to work with Incommunities providing a Strategic Improvement Programme, Facilitator Development Programme and a number of courses and facilitated events. Since then Incommunities have transformed their approach to organisational improvement. They have taken a consistent and systematic approach to corporate planning, strategy development, departmental and team planning and projects. This has led to outstanding results. However, in 2008 Lorraine recognised that economies of scale could be realised and more skills internalised if Incommunities' own Facilitators started to run the training in-house. This led to the decision to take a UIMPROVE Licence to allow four of the Facilitators to run Universal Improvement Skills and Improve Your Projects courses.

This has been so successful that Incommunities are now considering the option of opening up their training to partner organisations. This will have three benefits: (1) Better joint projects. (2) A consistent language and approach between organisations. (3) A new income stream for Incommunities.

In 2008, Incommunities were shortlisted for a UK Housing Award for using UIMPROVE to improve and develop capacity in their organisation. In contrast to the other shortlisted submissions which were about an individual project, the Incommunities submission was about the many successful projects they had carried out. In a 12 month period, Incommunities' 12 Facilitators ran more than 50 Project Events such as Kick-Starts involving 880 staff, external partners, Board members and tenants. By the end of 2008-09, they will have trained a further 100 staff with 200 more scheduled for 2009-10.

Click here to read the Incommunities award submission To see Jason Pollard and Eunice Wood talk about their first year as Facilitators at Incommunities, click here for Jason and here for Eunice.

To see Tamsin Wilson and Sally Redfern talk about training people with a UIMPROVE Licence, click here.