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Sub-community Hoogvliet

Sub-community Hoogvliet does not meet the stereotypical image of a governmental institution, which is often gray and bureaucratic. According to information manager Jan Meijsen the organization is quite dynamic and focused on renewal and improvement. A number of years ago the sub-community made a great effort to improve the surroundings of her residents. Apart from that, she also wanted to improve her internal structure, thereby hoping to be able to provide better quality. Jan explains the role of TimEnterprise in this process.

Restructuring

“Sub-community Hoogvliet used to suffer from a negative image”, Jan Meijsen says. “ As a city situated around the petrochemical industry the housing was often limited. As a result the more wealthy inhabitants left Hoogvliet and moved to newly built houses in the surrounding municipalities. Subsequently, a strategic restructuring seemed to be in order. 33% of the available inhabitable houses (5000 houses) were demolished and in its place differentiated housing was built, suitable for every income bracket. This process is now halfway finished and the results can only be called highly satisfactory. The restructuration operation had as an effect that beside their regular employees, the sub-community was confronted with employees that were posted on a temporal base. In order to monitor the entire process, hour registration became a necessity. At that time the first step towards the introduction of inter-organizational hour registration was taken.”

Changes within the organization

“At that time we weren't using TimEnterprise yet. We started out with an application we had developed ourselves. This application's options were limited. Sub-community Hoogvliet is a ISO-certified organization since 2001, and works according to the INK quality model. This means that the sub-community is a learning organization constantly working on quality improvement. The old time entry system was becoming less and less suitable as the organization changed. That is why we decided to introduce another application that was more user-friendly and offered more options. We finally chose for TimEnterprise.”

Quality improvement

“In November 2007 we started up the TimEnterprise project. The fact that our employees were no strangers to registering hours was a bonus. It was also a logical consequence of working with a quality model. That is why the change-over to TimEnterprise went very smoothly. Registering hours as a means may appear threatening to employees. After all, it shows exactly what people do on a day. Consequently, employees might fear that their employers form a negative impression of them based upon these data. This, however, is not our intention. What is our intention, is to have people do their job within the time they have available. By registering time you can see as an organization how much time employees spend on which projects. With this indicative information an organization is better able to both anticipate and react to the actual requirement and use the (possibly subsequent) freed resources to enhance the quality of its service. “

Management information

“TimEnterprise can bring us the management information we require to better direct the time of our employees. What makes the system so effective is the option to calculate data and create overviews. For instance, we expect to be better able to plan projects in the future by comparing planned hours with actual hours. Using TimEnterprise has mainly had a lot of consequences for the management. The information managers can get out of TimEnterprise includes far more than purely the registered hours. It requires a lot of creativity to interpret this data in the broadest sense of the word. After all, the managers are responsible for creating the conditions that enable people to work at the very height of their capacity. TimEnterprise is a tool that enables them to gain the information they require to perform this task.”

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