Case Study - The Aldgate Advice Centre

Volunteer Stephen Mohan, Managing Director of Retail Operations M & G, describes how he used his project management skills to help The Aldgate Advice Centre.

Project Summary

The Aldgate Advice Centre is part of the St Botolph's Project charity, offering advice and support to homeless clients. The day centre aims to help clients move back into society rather than to become a point of dependency. This means that they offer advice, training, information and advocacy. None of the clients are in permanent housing. There is a wide range of demography, language and problems. Perhaps 40% have literacy problems and there is a high level of mental health problems.

Many of the clients attending the centre require simple signposting information. However the number of clients attending the centre meant that a wait of 2-3 hours was often required for an enquiry that only took 2 minutes when finally dealt with.

Project Delivery

I worked with the staff at the Centre to see how we could address this problem. We decided that the best solution was an IT based information system for clients which would provide restricted access to relevant websites. The system had to be usable by clients with little or no IT experience and with whom English was often not the first language. We also built in other refinements such as the capacity for client to print off information and a monitoring and audit system which can tell staff which kinds of information are most requested.

My role was primarily one of project co-ordination. I produced a project initiation document which outlined the technical specification required, together with a project plan for delivering this solution. Another charity, the Peabody Trust, has a training scheme in web development for unemployed people and they did an excellent piece of work developing the front end of the system to the required specification. Whilst this work was taking place, a quick prototype of the system was tested in the Centre, and the client take up exceeded our expectations, reassuring us that we were on the right track.

My input in the project was a few hours a month over a 4/5 month period. After producing the initial project documentation, my main role was following this through with the various parties involved – making sure things happened when they should or chasing them up when they hadn’t! The system will be fully operational in November 2002.

Lessons learnt

On the whole the process of delivering the project worked well. As is often the case the hold-ups were in unexpected areas. Getting some simple phrases translated into different languages took far longer than expected, and there were also delays when key people in the project were off sick. The trick was to keep a sense of momentum for the project even when there were delays.

Outcomes for the charity

From our work to date we can see that this approach provides a quicker, better service the Centre’s clients. An unexpected but welcome by-product has been to increase client’s interest in IT. For some clients this was their first direct contact with IT and this can serve as an introduction to the more formal IT training which St Botolph’s Project runs at another of its centres.

Outcomes for Volunteer

I really enjoyed the experience and working on a defined project for a short period I felt creative in a way that isn’t always possible in the world of business. It was good to know that I can still enjoy the real world, and that I could add value to the work of the Centre staff (who I was really impressed by and whose work I certainly couldn’t do!)