This is the tenth edition of the Putting the Human back into technology podcast, its called John Stenton – Part 1 – Communication. 

For the tenth episode we decided to change things a little, we broke the interview into two parts and will release each part separately. This is part one.

We have made a tweak to our questions too. You can find the questions asked in part one below, along with a transcript of the answers.

This week’s Guest on “Putting the Human Back into Technology Podcast” is John Stenton, The Head of IT for Thrive Homes. John gives a very candid interview about how his organisation uses technology and the impact the last year has had on the people of the Thrive Homes

The Links

You can view on YouTube here

You can listen on Anchor here

The Questions

We asked John the following questions.

1. Tell me a little about what you do, your business, job/role?
2. Thinking about the people/technology impacts of the last year, what lessons will you take forward, and how do you see these being delivered?
3. Do you think users have grown in their confidence in using technology since lockdown?
4. What’s the best piece of business or career advice you’ve been given?

Previous Episodes

• Episode 1 – Special Guest Mark Williams
• Episode 2 – Special Guest Simon Jones
• Episode 3 – Special Guest David Rawle
• Episode 4 – Special Guest Ben Kite
• Episode 5 – Microsoft Build Edition
• Episode 6 – Special Guests Simon Grosse and Liz Rogers
• Episode 7 – Special Guest Ben Morris
• Episode 8 – Special Guest Edwin Sarmiento
• Episode 9 – Special Guest David Richards

John’s Answers – The Transcript

Question 1 – Tell me a little about what you do, your business, job/role?

Okay, thrive Homes is a housing association. We started just over 11 years ago, taking three and a half 1000 properties from the Three Rivers council as social housing. And since then, we’ve grown, and in the next couple of days, we’re about to announce that we’ve just hit 5000 properties, which is a big milestone for us, we were very small, and that’s significant growth. And that’s good for us. I joined thrive homes just coming up to three and a half years ago. And when I joined, things were a little bit of a state. The IT infrastructure itself was unreliable. So the email was down for two weeks out for the first week, I joined the databases were down and and carried on being down for two more weeks. So that was quite poor, the business was badly affected. So the first thing I had to do was stabilise the infrastructure. So we moved everything into as you closed the data centre, which got rid of the technical debt problem we had. I moved everybody off the substandard telephony system onto Skype for Business with a wrap over for the contact centre, which works well. However, we did move off it recently, obviously, because we’ve moved to teams. Yeah, I got rid of Citrix or got everybody a laptop, which then allowed me to start bringing them home, working and working from any location in the country with a secure VPN.

It’s all stabilisation for the first year, which was included getting us into office 365, get rid of the Exchange Server was good, brought in the stability. And then the default started. And that’s when we started looking at the applications and the data. And that’s where I’ve been pushing things since. Because the Housing Association applications are quite dated and not very flexible, and they’re costly to get changed. So we’re just going through a transformation program where we start the procurement to move into Microsoft Dynamics. 

People, people don’t like change. And we all know that. But the one thing I found with changes once you started the ball rolling, it’s like a great big snowball. If you keep it going, it’s not too bad. If you stop, you have to start all over again. Yeah. So the, in the very first instance, with the as your move, and with moving to Office 365, it was around. And because we’re small hands, ha at the time, we were still 100 employees, and I learned that everybody’s name and everybody knew they could talk to me. It’s just talking about advantages. Yes, things are going to change. Yes, you’re going to have to do things slightly differently. But you’re going to be able to do it, it’s going to work consistently time after time, after time, which you don’t have today, you’ll have a lot less interruptions, you’ll have a lot more productivity. And they all work a lot better. But it’s the one thing that I cannot stress enough is communication. And I might not be the best at it. But I try my darndest to talk to people explain what’s going on what’s in it for them, what are they going to get out of the change, but keep the change going. And anyone that if you know any of my users are never stop introducing change. Even if it’s changing the MFA, or, or, or just introducing planner, anything that we can do in the business that just keeps that ball rolling and the user See, yep, John’s bringing something new in, let’s get on with it. We know it’s going to help us. It helps. And he keeps it going. But it’s communication. That’s the main thing, Mark. So that’s, that’s really, really good to hear. 

Question 2 – Thinking about the people/technology impacts of the last year, what lessons will you take forward, and how do you see these being delivered?

Technically was we were already set up. And just before a lockdown, our CEO literally just walked out onto the office door and said, right, that’s it, folks. We’re going to work from home from now on, please remember to take your headsets home, and everyone could work from home. What has been difficult for me, and I’ve really had to it comes back to communication and I’ve had to adapt is not being able to sit with somebody side by side to explain their issues. So it’s it’s turned into a long protracted process for something that we could have just sorted out in five minutes just by showing me if I’d stood at someone’s desk. So for me, I think communications and how you communicate has really changed. screen sharing in teams is an absolute godsend. But for me, it is really helped emphasise, not emphasise but improved my communication skills and my whole team.

Do you think do you think the user is getting better at communicating their issues? 

They are certainly getting better at it. They understand the difficulties, but they’ve also grown in confidence in it as well. If they had to hook up their, their laptop to a spare screen, then having a go at them, right? Where before they’d have just a job help.

How has governance worked for you?

From a Microsoft Teams perspective, I’ve let people just get on with it. At some point, we will have to look in and find out how we’re using it and what teams have been orphaned and what have been left behind what’s necessarily what isn’t. As for SharePoint, we all know Microsoft backup everything SharePoint. But for SharePoint, we’ve actually helped and built a document repository for each team. Right? Okay. And we’ve talked them through how to use it, how to secure it, how to secure it, but at the same time, we’ve totally locked it down so that no one outside of Thrive can access it. So if people need to change exchange documents with third parties, we’ve actually put a bolt on the outside edge of SharePoint. So we can have external document repositories. So we don’t have to use we transfer and other tools like that Dropbox, because they’re always getting compromised. At least this way, we have more control over it, we know what’s going on. And we know we can click keep it clean. So essentially, you’ve got a

Question 4 – What’s the best piece of business or career advice you’ve been given?

The best piece of advice I’ve been given, and I’m trying very hard to do with it, is to communicate more with your users. And it’s a really important point. It really is. And that came to me very early on in my career, talk more, and listen, listen more and talk about what you need to. But do it succinctly.