Housing group tasks community project for manager development

West Midlands-based Festival Housing Group is an early adopter of Echelon Learning’s Community Project Challenge (CPC) management training initiative.

CPC is being tasked to support the Group’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals and achieve Cert.M qualification as a key plank in its career development programme for managers.

CPC participants use action learning methods to manage a 'real time' project. Support is provided via a programme coach and a bespoke project web site which fields a variety of online project management and knowledge tools. A personal learning log provides evidence for qualifications and continuous professional development (CPD).

Established in March 2002, Festival Housing’s origins lie in the transfer to its member housing associations of local authority housing stock from Malvern Hills District Council and Wychavon District Council.

With a remit to offer good quality of life through healthy and sustainable communities, the Group today owns and manages 8,000 properties, providing affordable housing, student and market-rent accommodation, care and supported housing, and building maintenance services.

Supporting aims, focused on increasing capacity to deliver corporate objectives and drive improvement, include the clear need to attract, develop and retain the best quality staff and Board members.

This project seeks to help Festival become an attractive local employer. It also supports the development of staff in 21st century management and communication skills (course members have rapidly become adept at using the online project management tools available on the project website) and help build useful cross organisation relationships in an organisation spanning several counties.

Selected managers use this innovative learning and organisation development model to establish a mutual benefit partnership with two local secondary schools.

A core aim of Festival Housing is to become a local employer of choice by providing students with a structured work experience programme that attracts them to work with the Group and by providing helpful careers support to local schools.

It looks additionally to integrate the community partnership development model into the FH Certificate in Management Programme and further assist its staff in acquiring new skills in a work based environment and also encourage their CPD.

The CPC programme consists of a specific time-bound project of around three months in duration.

Each participant spends around five days on the project, which aligns specific organisational objectives with prescribed learning outcomes, and is coached and facilitated throughout by Echelon consultants to build partnerships, experience and evidence Cert.M learnings, manage individual and team performance, organisational change, and deliver a sustainable solution.

Participants also have access to the bespoke CPC website. A development, communications and project management hub, and a repository of downloadable learning and development tools, it is a facility that can be extended to other users and for longer if required.

For Festival Housing, the programme provides an active, assessable, development opportunity underpinning all the Cert.M modules using action learning methods with assessable evidence across the whole programme and with specific evidence for Workshop 3.1 Managing Change.

Project lead at Festival Housing Group, Kay Dovey sees CPC enabling a corporate project management framework benefiting the organisation in improved project management skills and cross-organisational networking and enhanced performance on key reputation indices.

"We are developing an understanding and methodology for coaching at work and embedding learning into the organisation in a practical and sustainable way," she says.

"CPC is helping improve individual and team effectiveness and aligning our outputs more closely to customer needs which in turn is improving customer satisfaction. Longer-term, CPC provides support succession planning by identifying relevant programme participants."

Further information on Echelon CPC from Jenny Hill on tel. 020 8568 1500; email jenny@echelonL.com

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About Echelon CPC
Echelon CPC is a management development initiative delivering sustainable, results in areas of individual learning, teambuilding project management and community social responsibility.
Organisations commission this approach to learning when they need to develop leadership and management skills and deliver accredited programmes; improve project and team working; build teams and networks across the organisation; secure improved performance on delivering sustainable outcomes; enhance corporate social responsibility amongst managers.
Echelon facilitators train Project Leaders or participants to deliver a sustainable outcome for a local community by managing a time bound project lasting around three months to build partnerships, manage individual and team performance and deliver a sustainable solution.
They aim to establish and meet personal development needs aligned with organisational priorities; transfer and sustain learning to improve performance; publish and share best practice via a bespoke web site which acts as a development, communications and tracking hub (ideal for accredited programmes).
The site can contain online diagnostics for 360 degree review, learning preferences and work/life balance. It can also offer a library of performance support tools and checklists as well as trainers tools for action learning, PDP logs and validation and evaluation tools.