Homelessness task maintenance overview

Government statute dictates that housing authorities have a legal obligation to ensure that all people within their locality have free access to advice and information about homelessness, in particular covering the range of measures and contributory factors that can mitigate the risk for those that would otherwise be affected. Furthermore, this duty is extended to providing assistance to individuals and families who are already homeless, or threatened with homelessness, and have submitted an application for help. If, following initial inquiries, homeless applicants are deemed not to have a priority need, or the reason for their situation has been brought about through their own actions, this duty extends only to the provision of help in their search towards finding suitable accommodation; the authority itself would have no responsibility to ensure that accommodation is made available. Through a case management approach, Civica Cx Housing promotes the aim of delivering more effective and consistent support to all those facing the prospect of homelessness, empowering housing staff to secure positive recovery and resettlement outcomes for each service user. Whilst the complexities of each case can be quite varied, it is possible for a housing authority to map out the triggered actions for each scenario using a range of custom tasks. Any number of discrete tasks can be linked to a homelessness case via an associated activity - categorised as Prevention and Relief, Assessment or Review - with a specific attribute governing whether each task can appear more than once within the same execution plan. In structuring all the activities that are relevant to a case, tasks can be added manually at the point of need, or they can be linked automatically by virtue of their existence within an underlying workflow path. Dictated by the nature of the assigned tasks, dependencies can be configured between them to restrict the point at which related tasks are commenced.

All related tasks activated as a consequence of raising a homelessness case can be service level driven and form an integral part of a wider Service Level Agreement (SLA). Inherited within each homelessness task are three defined components of SLA compliance tracking: amber warning period, follow-on escalation and target completion exceeded. Once a task-specific SLA indicator is reached during the progression of a homelessness case, the system can be configured to dispatch an automatic alert to individual user accounts that are identified through the task definition escalation rules, notifying them of the situation. User accounts can be linked directly to the SLA notification process or by association through their membership of an allocated role. The next progression phase can also be controlled through a follow-on rule i.e. the actions to be undertaken in the instance where an escalated task is still outstanding after a defined period. At the point of raising a new homelessness case, and in accordance with the end user's configuration preferences, the default ownership for each associated task is automatically transferred from the definition, specifically one or more individual user accounts together with any additional role permissions.

Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of homelessness task maintenance, including:

• To create a new homelessness task definition
• To add an information field to a homelessness task definition
• To assign custom lookup values to a homelessness task information field
• To allocate a role to a homelessness task definition
• To allocate a user to a homelessness task definition
• To add an SLA target to a homelessness task definition