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• A systematic approach to service improvement

Housing

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Summary

This report provides a review of work undertaken to explore the use of 'systems thinking' in a social housing setting. In particular, the research considered the effects on the delivery of housing management and maintenance services and assessed efficiency gains arising.

Systems thinking takes many forms, but in all of those forms it examines issues from a 'whole system' approach. That is to say, it considers the system as a whole and not as a collection of separate parts. Failure to recognise the relationship between the parts of a system leads to a silo mentality. This focus on parts of a system, rather than the whole, can be the cause of numerous organisational problems such as resistance to change.

The systems thinking methodology examined for the purposes of this exercise is that undertaken by Vanguard Consulting under the name of 'lean systems'. The methodology is described in detail in Chapter 3. However, in sponsoring this project the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) is not endorsing one particular consultant's approach to systems thinking; any views expressed are those of the author not those of the ODPM, nor can they be attributed to any individual member of the evaluation panel. An overview of systems thinking in its wider sense is in appendix 1.

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• A systematic approach to service improvement - Evaluating Systems Thinking in Housing
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