ASB configuration management overview
The process of ASB management has a number of contributory factors that need to be configured at the outset in order to inform daily activities, operations and functions. These configuration components enable the housing organisation to define specific parameters in line with their own procedures and local requirements. Additional values and attributes can be appended to the records at any time, as required, although maintaining comprehensive information from the start will reap its own rewards. There are several key areas that fall under the category of ASB configuration management: escalation rule maintenance, task maintenance and category maintenance.
ASB Escalation Rule Maintenance - All ASB activities within the control of the housing organisation, both directly and indirectly, can be service level driven and form an integral part of a wider Service Level Agreement (SLA). Escalation rules define the automatic events to be triggered in the instance where a task exceeds the SLA target, or reaches a predefined warning period. The escalation process would typically notify the case or task owner, their immediate line manager, and potentially members of a stakeholder group using customised communication templates. The escalation process is not just a one-off exercise but rather subsequent follow-on rules can be defined and triggered in the event that a task has stagnated beyond a defined period. Open tasks can therefore be continually tracked and actively progressed through to a successful outcome.
ASB Task Maintenance - An ASB task is a specific activity that must be undertaken as an outcome of a reported ASB incident from which a case has been generated. A discrete task could be, say, to interview the complainant, send a warning letter, liaise with police or arrange a multi-agency meeting; indeed any single event that will help to structure and define the workflow of a case. All ASB tasks activated as a consequence of raising a new case can be service level driven and linked to escalation rules, such that a defined process is initiated in the event that their progression falls behind agreed targets. Within each ASB task, there are three key components of SLA compliance tracking: amber warning period, follow-on escalation and target completion exceeded.
ASB Category Maintenance - Anti-social behaviour is defined as any act that has or is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress. ASB can take many forms and therefore, in order to benchmark performance, housing organisations need to categorise the different types of behaviour into logical classification pairings. These classification pairings consist of an ASB Type - Drugs / Alcohol, Harassment, Noise, Hate Crime, etc. - as well as an ASB Category - Parties, Loud Music, Animals, etc. - and can be cross-referenced to the classification framework defined through the National Standard for Incident Recording (NSIR), ensuring that all incidents are recorded and analysed in a consistent manner. A range of potential priorities should also be linked to each ASB category, with the specific value most appropriate to the incident set for each live case.
ASB Priority Maintenance - In line with a housing organisation's published customer charter, the timely progression of each ASB case will be controlled through a formal review process. The period of review is set at priority level and defined by service level agreements which are used to steer the target completion milestones; hence the review timescales for individual ASB cases will be independently set, based on the assigned categories and inherent priority types.
The increasing focus on early intervention solutions depends on the timely allocation of ASB cases to highly trained officers who possess an excellent understanding of all influencing factors and relevant local knowledge. To that end, Civica Cx Housing enables end users to configure allocation rules that are automatically applied to cases upon first creation, thus ensuring that ownership is passed to the most appropriate resource. Such rules are triggered based on the specific custom category linked to each new case; where no rules apply, ownership preferences are specified on-the-fly.
Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of ASB configuration management, including: