Neighbourhood insight at scale

Peabody is one of the UK’s oldest not-for-profit housing associations, founded by philanthropist George Peabody in 1862 to help Londoners in need. Today it takes a local approach, working with residents and communities to strengthen its 140 neighbourhoods. Peabody looks after 109,000 homes and 220,000 residents across London and the home counties, and provides care and support to 25,000 customers.

Managing a portfolio of this scale places constant demands on teams managing neighbourhoods.  Peabody neighbourhood managers provide support, work with residents to manage their homes and neighbourhoods, deal with local issues, carry out inspections and improve local services. And the data that should support those judgements can be scattered across multiple systems of record.

The Regulator of Social Housing’s consumer standards place a clear expectation on housing associations to understand residents’ needs, respond effectively to complaints, and provide safe, well-managed services. For Peabody, this means using data not just for reporting, but to build a clearer picture of residents and neighbourhoods, identify where support may be needed, and act earlier to improve outcomes. In short, data is firmly a business issue.

For Peabody’s neighbourhood and area managers, the problem was simple: it wasn’t always easy to see what was happening on their patch. Managers were spending too much time gathering data on tenancies, vulnerability flags, complaints, arrears and more from multiple systems and reports, when they wanted to spend more time delivering services for residents. Area managers needed a clearer way to see what was happening at neighbourhood level, and to drill into any problems or increases in demand.

Issues that should have been spotted as emerging trends instead appeared as fully formed complaints, and critical information about residents was difficult to see against the noise of day-to-day operational data.

To fix this, we designed and built a Neighbourhoods dashboard to give managers a single view of their neighbourhood data, from the headlines down to the detail of an individual resident.

We brought together eight major data sources, including the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and the housing management system, alongside flat files and spreadsheets – for example mapping which neighbourhood manager looks after which patch. Peabody’s infrastructure partner handled the initial ingestion; Red Olive delivered everything from landing the data onwards: the modelling, transformation and visualisation.

The data held across multiple systems created a particular technical challenge: how to connect records using different keys such as customer numbers, tenancy references and property identifiers. Solving this problem meant our dashboard could – for the first time – show a single view of residents, their homes, and their circumstances. Our solution worked consistently at neighbourhood, area and group levels, giving area managers the big picture and the ability to go into further detail where their attention was needed.

Red Olive, Peabody’s internal team, and Peabody’s infrastructure partner worked as an embedded team:  we held reviews with the business at every stage to keep the work close to the user need, and the tight integration of our visualisation and data engineering teams meant requests raised in a show-and-tell could be addressed before the session had ended. This was Agile delivery at pace, but the magic ingredient was the mutual trust between us.

For Peabody’s Neighbourhoods teams, the impact of the new dashboards has been transformational. When the dashboard was demonstrated to operational teams, the feedback from the floor was described to us by Peabody’s Head of Data Products: in one show-and-tell, an area manager described the dashboard as a game-changer for their work, because they could now deal with issues before they became complaints.

The work of a neighbourhood manager is never done, and neither is the work of building the data foundations that support them. The dashboard has changed what’s possible for the teams using it day-to-day, and those same foundations are now creating reusable information through the data platform for other business needs. This helps Peabody keep moving towards a future where local teams have the right data at their fingertips to support residents in the places they live.