INTRODUCTION
When the history of social housing is discussed, Octavia (and our founder Octavia Hill) is never too far away. Having served the sector for over 150 years, Octavia now provides homes, support, and care for people in central and west London and owns and manages around 4,000 units. Now into our 5th year of using True Compliance we thought it was finally time for us at Octavia to share our experiences of using True Compliance in writing, in the hope that this may help other organisations in their
search for a compliance solution.
When approaching this case study, we didn’t really know where to start, there are so many areas that True Compliance helps the compliance team and so we have tried to break it down to the fundamental benefits.
OCTAVIA HOUSING
Manages 4,000 properties.
Central and West London.
Has used True Compliance for 5 years.
SUPPORTING STAFF
Firstly, we see True Compliance as a mechanism to support staff if they are struggling; for example, if their workload is too much and needs rebalancing (if they have a busier patch than another staff member) it helps us to easily recognise this. It’s not just a compliance solution but also a tool that helps us to support our staff in being successful in their jobs at Octavia, and of course keeping compliant.
For fire and water assessments it helps us create a rolling programme. It also helps with the management of actions which must be acted upon. It’s like having live visibility of where we are at any time for every action, who is responsible for the actions, the ability to keep on track and to ensure that we have a complete view of accountability and responsibility for all our compliance streams in one place in real-time.
REDUCING ADMIN AND HUMAN ERROR
Before we partnered with True Compliance, we managed our compliance on many, many spreadsheets and we manually had to update information like the dates of an assessment into these. In excel you could automate some of the formulas to make your life a little easier, but this often meant that mistakes could happen where formulas weren’t updated, or cells were formatted as a date instead of a number.
A classic example is a typing error where someone would accidentally type 2012 as the date instead of 2021 which doesn’t seem a major issue for one property (it is) but where the same column or row is ‘copied and pasted’ then this is a major compliance failure and presents a risk to our residents, staff, business, and reputation. Furthermore, if the date was typed as 2024 instead of 2023 this would mean a high-risk building could have gone a year without
assessment and we cannot let this happen. 
FOCUSING ON THE PRIORITIES
We had high confidence in our compliance levels before True Compliance but when we loaded some of the certificates we could see clearly and easily right in front of us on our own dashboards where we weren’t as compliant as we thought we were. For example, there were certificates with signatures missing, where manual checks had been done, we had a WRA missing a priority on one of the actions which we would have missed. If True Compliance hadn’t identified these errors, it could have been weeks or months before we’d found them (after manually reviewing the certificates) at which point this could have presented a huge risk to Octavia.
Data entry is usually a late in the day activity where staff are tired, it’s the end of the day, phones are ringing after being out all day, you’re thinking about winding down for the evening and so mistakes are more likely to happen with data input. We can now protect against this as True Compliance has helped us to move away from using
spreadsheets which not only reduces the human error but improves our data integrity and quality, saving us countless hours of administration time not having to manually data enter the compliance information from a certificate or document. We now spend our time doing the activities to improve our compliance rather than administrating.
We had high confidence in our compliance levels before True Compliance but when we loaded some of the certificates we could see clearly and easily right in front of us on our own dashboards where we weren’t as compliant as we thought we were. For example, there were certificates with signatures missing, where manual checks had been done, we had a WRA missing a priority on one of the actions which we would have missed. If True Compliance hadn’t identified these errors, it could have been weeks or months before we’d found them (after manually reviewing the certificates) at which point this could have presented a huge risk to Octavia.
True Compliance allows us to examine all certificates in greater detail, but it also points us directly at the certificates that need our attention most using our business rules. This means that we now only must check a small part of those certificates that are flagged and to quickly and easily focus in on the priorities rather than going through reams of certificates and trying to spot the error. True Compliance gives us the confidence we need that our compliance levels are where they should be.
360 VIEW
Here at Octavia, we are not a big fan at looking backwards, we like to see where we are going rather than looking at the past but sometimes in compliance you need to have a 360 view and it’s easy for us to access and review past information in True Compliance, whereas this would have been days spent living in spreadsheets and
certificates previously.
NOT YOUR TYPICAL SOFTWARE PROVIDER
We were a little doubtful initially that a software solution could offer the flexibility that we needed; particularly how our business rules would need to be applied to certificates to ensure they are processed in the right way. True Compliance offered us exactly what we needed in being able to apply our own rules, ensuing that we can decide how we want to manage compliance (rather than being told by the supplier how it should be done). This even goes down to including things like the cost of works which is sent back to the contractor.
As contractors have the access that we give them this means that our team doesn’t need to do the manual work relating to getting the info over to them which saves us even more time. Our aim in the future is for contractors to upload evidence to the action which can then be sent to us for approval in the system itself, taking the onus off us and putting the responsibility on the contractor as well as removing the double handling of data.
