“When you see things that could be better or could produce better outcomes…it’s pretty exciting to make those changes.”
New services, new laws, new policies. All create new problems.
Imagine this…
- More than a dozen different supportive housing voucher programs
- Several different funding sources
- More than 30 employees
…and little to no documented processes.
This type of challenge in process improvement can be daunting.
It could take someone like Georgia Howard, who has more than 20 years of experience in project management, 4–5 months to tackle.
But not this time.
Currently, thousands of Colorado residents depend on housing voucher programs.
Each housing voucher program helps a different subset of the population afford housing—this includes low-income families, families living with disabilities, veterans, etc.
All 12 of these housing voucher programs are processed by the Colorado Department of Housing.
The problem?
Service documentation was tough to pin down; most artifacts for how the services work were out of date, and new policies, laws, and programs lacked specific workflows.
Enter Coco.
As part of our team at Change Agents and rvrwrk, Georgia deployed our little robot to help the Colorado Department of Housing organize the administration of its housing voucher programs.
Coco (the computerized consultant) handled the process discovery from employees seamlessly by conducting one-on-one interviews
After transcribing and consolidating the data from these interviews, Coco was able to create detailed artifacts and process maps for each of the housing vouchers.
From that point, Georgia, Coco, and the Colorado Department of Housing team gained a comprehensive understanding of how each of the delivery streams for the various housing voucher programs operated.
In talking about the process, Georgia said, “I think one of the biggest aha moments that was provided to this process is there are more similarities than differences in these programs, and so that really provides a level playing field on which to build and to say,
‘Hey, we can manage these very similarly.’
Just because each housing voucher program had a different funding source didn’t mean they had to use different systems and processes for each one.
Upon realizing this, they were able to standardize the process for the housing voucher programs, making it so “more [employees] could be able to cover more types of vouchers and to interact with more client groups.”
Not only did Coco paint a clearer picture, but it also helped Georgia spend more time on the problem—rather than the 30 hours it would’ve taken to interview and analyze employee processes.
As a process improvement expert, what used to take Georgia 4-5 months took a quarter of that time.
If stress is something you can cut in half, Coco helped Georgia and the housing team slice right through it.
Coco can help you map out disparate processes around the same service.
By utilizing Coco as a team member, Georgia was able to focus on what really matters—the solutions that make everything a little easier.
Sometimes, we can get exhausted by the current state of our systems… getting to the future feels like an impossible task.
You can read about our work with the Colorado Department of Housing team here.
Want to schedule a demo with Coco? Try for free here.
P.S. Wondering who Coco is?
Coco is an automated phone agent who can interview multiple people simultaneously about their unique experiences with the same service, capturing their real experiences with your services.
It’s the heart of my new company, rvrwrk (River Work), which I launched with Mike Sarasti in July 2024.
We’re the first of our kind: a technology-enabled service that helps you uncover the root causes of your process problems in minutes, not weeks. Click here to learn more.
P.P.S. Month of July soundtrack, courtesy of Kora,