In the wake of COVID and the flood of problems and challenges that came with it, councils and public services providers, including Social Care and Housing, were suddenly forced to think fast and act faster. The ability to react to change and adjust work patterns at speed became more crucial than ever, but that vital speed simply couldn’t be allowed to come at the cost of quality assurance.

So just how were providers to maintain those standards when so many more of their teams were working from home? What did they have to do differently to support community safety for those services that were still running? What could they do to replace services that were currently closed, and how could they restore those services as soon as possible? How were they to improve their outcomes when the way they did things was forced to change repeatedly through different phases of work pattern, lock-down, staff illness and absence, crisis action planning, lending staff between services or even between organisations, and how were they to keep track of decisions that would need reversing after COVID-19?

At InPhase, we’ve had the privilege of working with councils, housing providers, care providers, NHS and Fire Services across the UK for over two decades, implementing custom systems to report and improve on everything from COVID-19 dashboards and Infection Prevention and Control, incidents and home safety checks, corporate risk, corporate plans, service plans, team plans, action plans and projects, Executive Reports, committee reports, public transparency reporting and more.

And it’s time for change.

For many years, we’ve seen Councils and public service providers work on separate, scattered systems for different aspects of management. Some teams battle with a bewildering array of spreadsheets to add their vital operational data into management reporting, while some have to tackle multiple different action plans and action lists from members meetings, committee meeting minutes, governance and risk committees, finance committees, area meetings, station and watch action plans, Audit Commissions, CQC, OFSTED, HMICFRS action plans, Health and Safety, audit action plans and more.

Some teams have “Frankenstein” hybrid of digital, manual and spreadsheet systems and a plethora of un-aligned plans with which to plan, report and manage.

Plans are often only revised sporadically - often after several years – because after all, how much business challenge and change can there really be in a monopoly supplier that’s funded by government?

But this year is like no other and the disjointed systems and processes for managing and improving things are no longer fit for purpose. How then, can we make that necessary digital step change?

Over the past year of the pandemic, InPhase have been hard at work creating an integrated digital suite of ready-to-use apps for high-speed integrated planning, performance, projects, actions and risks. We’ve drawn from best practices from over 20 years of experience and over 200 implementations for councils, social care, NHS, Fire Services, housing providers and others.

The result is a new, integrated suite of best practice-led apps that will deliver a step change in your service management.

Why ‘integrated’? Because viable plans created with our apps will not only include projects and actions but will also identify the operational objectives that lead to planned outcomes, as well as the risk that may impact them.

Corporate Risks should be linked to the service outcomes and operational objectives that you’re undertaking. And those risks in turn require procedures (controls) and actions (mitigations) which individuals, watches, stations and departments all need to deliver.

When reporting and managing their performance and governance, management needs to be able to see their current performance - where it’s succeeding, where it’s failing, where it needs to change, what’s currently being done to change it, what’s previously been tried (and whether it succeeded or failed), what needs collaboration and what should be done next. Not only do they need to plan what comes next, they must also have a clear view of how those changes are progressing and what impact they will have.

It’s 2021 and these days we no longer need to cobble together disparate systems, reports, spreadsheets, emails, minutes, documents, presentations and yet more emails. Today we can use a single, intuitive digital solution that provides integrated assurance of the whole management approach for a modern crucial public service provider.

There’s no need to put up with wasted resources, failure to deliver plans or confusion over priorities anymore.

Robert Hobbs

Chief Executive Officer

InPhase’s Chief Executive and Founder, Robert has been the visionary leading InPhase to be one of the UK's leading providers of management, governance and assurance solutions, and helping organisations align their actions and goals more easily and efficiently with InPhase's suite of integrated apps.