UIC

9th Annual UIMPROVE Conference, May 2015

The 9th Annual UIMPROVE Conference was held on 11-12 May 2015 in Sheffield. Below you will find videos of all the speakers and photos from the event.

Judith Burbidge, Director of Neighbourhoods and Wellbeing, Weaver Vale Housing Trust

This year we were delighted to welcome Judith Burbidge, Director of Neighbourhoods and Wellbeing at Weaver Vale Housing Trust, as our Keynote Speaker. Weaver Vale has been working with the UIC for 11 years and Judith has been at the forefront of helping them achieve over 90% customer satisfaction and making it into The Times Top 100 not-for-profit Employers for the past 6 years running.

Judith is a self-confessed 'Systems Addict' and used her Keynote Speech to reflect on steps teams at Weaver Vale have taken to control their processes and hold onto the gains. Her honesty about the highs and lows of developing a system based approach proved very popular and Judith's depth of knowledge and experience generated some fantastic conversations about improvement for the rest of the conference.

Rachel Gee, Chris Radford and Vicky Young, Contour Homes

Next we welcomed Rachel Gee, Insight and Innovation Manager at Contour Homes, along with Chris Radford (Performance Officer) and Vicky Young (Project Officer). Rachel introduced UIMPROVE to Contour Homes in July 2015, when a group of 12 began the Facilitator Development Programme. In this video, Rachel, Chris and Vicky tell us about the successes they've had introducing Facilitators to the organisation as well as some lessons learned and tips for managing a Facilitator Network.

Gareth Parkin and Alex McIntyre, South Yorkshire Housing Association

Next we heard from South Yorkshire Housing Association, another organisation with a long history of working with UIMPROVE. Gareth Parkin, Programme Lead for Care, Health and Wellbeing, talked us through SYHA's transition from a 'pick and mix' approach to the embedding of UIMPROVE and how this has delivered significant improvements through multi-agency project working.

Alex McIntyre, Data Project Co-Ordinator, shared how he has helped to deliver SYHA's Frontline Customer Services project, an improvement project which sought to provide customers with choice and flexibility around how they access services. Alex demonstrated how Statistical Process Control has helped SYHA better understand the Call Centre's performance following the introduction of automated call handling.

Peter Strachan, Serco Caledonian Sleeper

Peter has been a good friend of the UIC from the beginning and is currently Managing Director of Serco Caledonian Sleeper, based in Inverness. It was our pleasure to welcome him back to the UIMPROVE Conference to reflect on his experience of working with us over the last 25 years in the many different organisations he has led on both sides of the world. With his good sense of humour and supreme sporting knowledge, Peter took us through his favourite UIMPROVE approaches including the Cocktail Party, Leader Speaks and Executive Events and how he has used them to successfully lead his teams.

Lou Tribus, St Thomas Aquinas Secondary School

Lou has been a very welcome guest at our conferences for many years and we were honoured to hear her presentation about the life of her father, Myron Tribus, the esteemed improvement thinker and practitioner. In her presentation, '9 Quality Decades and Counting', Lou took us through her father's early life, his CV and early engineering career before enlightening us as to how he became one of the giants of quality management.

Alison Levings, The Universal Improvement Company

Alison Levings is one of the UIC's newest recruits and joined us following her departure from our Brisbane client, TransLink, where she was a Facilitator and the Facilitator Network Coordinator. During her time as Network Coordinator, Alison experienced the same challenges as many of our clients - how to select the right people to become your Facilitators and then keep them active and engaged. Alison spent some time reflecting on the traits that are common amongst the most enthusiastic Facilitators and what the organisation can do to support their Facilitator Network. Rather than prescribe a one-size-fits-all approach to selecting potential Facilitators, Alison presented her thoughts on what to consider when contemplating who could be a great Facilitator and how she went about ensuring the last group she recruited were successful UIMPROVE practitioners.

Mike Davidge, NHS Elect

Mike Davidge, Director at NHS Elect, posed the question 'How do you hit a target?' Using some entertaining audience participation Mike demonstrated why understanding and improving a system is a far better approach to achieving targets than the common alternatives of distorting the data, or distorting the system. If you've ever read something along the lines of '95% of people must be seen and dealt with in the A&E Departments within 4 hours' and wondered, 'what about the other 5% and what makes 4 the magic number?' then you'll enjoy Mike's presentation and have a renewed appreciation of what the data in your own organisation could be telling you.

Photo gallery

Together Housing Group	Aspire Housing Group	South Yorkshire Housing Association
Contour Homes	Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Trust	St Thomas Aquinas Primary School