← Case Studies

Access Social Care, Disrupt Foundation

Helping Access Social Care choose a new Case Management System that fit the way their teams actually work

Project Type

Coaching Digital Transformation

Helping Access Social Care understand its needs, define requirements, learn new skills, and select a case-management system that better supported how the organisation worked.

Access Social Care needed a new case-management system, but choosing the technology was only part of the challenge. Different teams had different needs, existing processes had grown over time, and any new system needed to work across case management, reporting, communications and internal operations. We worked with the organisation to understand how people were working, where the problems were and what a future system needed to make easier. We then translated those findings into clear requirements and a structured way of assessing potential suppliers, helping Access Social Care move from a broad technology problem towards a more confident, evidence-based decision.

Key results

~1,700
existing cases considered as part of migration planning
3 stages
discovery, system selection and implementation planning
1 shared framework
for bringing different organisational needs into the same decision-making process

Understanding the problem before choosing the technology

Access Social Care were struggling to find a case-management system that met the needs of the organisations, and the people using it. It would have been easy to start with suppliers and feature lists. Instead, we (Open Refresh and Alpacka Collective) started with the organisation.

 

Amil and Abi started by asking Access Social Care (ASC) to identify team members, from various departments, that had both the energy and desire to be part of a working group. We then spoke with people across different areas of the organisation to understand how work was currently being done, where existing systems were creating friction and what staff needed from a future platform.

 

That meant looking beyond individual feature requests and understanding the underlying workflows behind them. The aim was to answer a more useful question:

  What does Access Social Care actually need this system to enable?

Turning organisational needs into clear requirements

The discovery work gave us a clearer picture of the organisation's priorities. We translated these into requirements covering areas such as:

  • case and client management
  • document and information management
  • email and calendar integration
  • roles and permissions
  • reporting and data access
  • security and audit requirements
  • migration of existing case data
  • training and ongoing support
 

This created a shared reference point for assessing potential systems. It also helped distinguish between things that were essential, things that would improve people's day-to-day work, and things that were useful but shouldn't drive the decision.

Creating a better way to make the decision

Choosing a system involved more than finding the strongest piece of software. Different teams naturally valued different things, so part of the work was creating a process through which those needs could be understood and compared.

  We helped bring people together around a shared set of priorities and gave the organisation a more consistent framework for assessing potential suppliers. Supporting the working group, we coached the team on how to prioritise their needs using User Stories. We guided the working group on how to construct stories, taking into account the outcome and value from having completed the action/using the feature they set out to.   This provided each member of the working group transparency over their choices, allowing everyone to contribute their perspectives and concerns so that we looked at the problems (and solution) holistically.

Platforms including AdvicePro and Lamplight were explored against these needs, looking at both their strengths and the areas where configuration, compromise or further investigation might be required. Rather than recommending technology in isolation, we helped Access Social Care understand the trade-offs involved in each option.

Looking beyond the sales demo

Supplier demonstrations can make almost any system look capable. Our role was to help Access Social Care look underneath that.

We considered how systems would fit real workflows, how easily staff could access and report on information, how permissions would work, what migration would involve and where additional development or configuration might be required.

 

We also looked at practical questions around implementation, support and organisational readiness. One key issue was that only one person was able to create reports and input data (into existing Sharepoint and data reporting systems), which the organisation had gotten used to. In order to improve workflows and de-risk the organisation of bottlenecks and the potential risk of losing skills should that employee leave the organisation, was to identify a solution that matched the organisation's ways of working, culture, and working behaviours.

 

Looking at the solution through this lens helped shift the conversation from:

 

“Which system has the most features?”

 

to

  “Which system best supports the way we need to work?”

Preparing for implementation

Selecting a platform was not the end of the process.

 

As part of the work we also considered what would be required to introduce a new system successfully, including data migration, staff training, configuration, support and the transition from existing processes.

  By thinking about implementation during the selection process, Access Social Care could assess not only whether a platform was technically capable, but what adopting it would mean in practice.

The outcome

Access Social Care came away with a much clearer understanding of what it needed from a future case-management system and a stronger basis for making the decision.

 

The organisation had:

  • clearer requirements grounded in real staff needs
  • a shared way to prioritise those requirements
  • a more structured method for assessing suppliers
  • greater visibility of the trade-offs between different options
  • a clearer picture of migration and implementation requirements
 

The technology mattered, but the most important part of the work was creating enough shared understanding for the organisation to make the right decision with confidence, for itself and for the long-term.