The Black Dog Institute
Bayley House is an organisation helping people living with an intellectual disability to reach their goals and realise their dreams.
For more than seven decades they have provided a warm, vibrant and close-knit community, along with accommodation, life and wellbeing services to enable their clients to live the life they choose.
The challenge
Bayley House had to adapt their commercial business processes and services in order to move from the previous DHHS block funding model to a user-pays model of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
The changes resulting from the introduction of the NDIS, had significantly increased workload due to a large portion of the existing finance and commercial processes being handled manually and set up to operate in a block-funded model.
IT systems and processes had evolved over time, and the team at Bayley House needed a comprehensive review to fully understand the current limitations, identify areas for improvement and develop a clear strategy and roadmap for implementation.
The approach
Escient approached the engagement holistically and over a month conducted interviews and workshops with frontline staff, supervisors and the executive management team to thoroughly understand the existing structure, processes, systems and ways of working.
This engagement, along with the application of their diagnostic service, ‘IT Effectiveness’, enabled us to identify and clarify high-pain points and prioritise their change effort to increase effectiveness.
In addition, we determined what technologies should be deployed to better enhance business operations as well as those that would best support improved marketing, promotions, fundraising and stakeholder communication.
We highlighted the gaps in the current business processes and how technology might work to close those gaps.
The knowledge obtained from these activities led to a series of well-structured and easy to articulate findings and recommendations, with a clear roadmap for implementation and likely high-level expenditure.
The outcome
Escient unearthed an opportunity to reimplement an existing client management system and rebuild core business processes to match the NDIS reporting requirements. Once implemented, the reimplemented system and new processes reduced the rework required by the finance and commercial teams and allowed Bayley House to better manage the delivery of its services to clients under the new NDIS operating model.
The team critically examined our business readiness and made practical and relevant recommendations which challenged some of our preconceptions, but made good sense. They were generous with their time and observations, providing a number of valuable insights related to, but not core to their engagement. We would happily engage Escient again.
— Warwick Cavanagh, CEO
Bayley House
At a glance
- One month engagement
- Two Escient consultants
- Over 15 stakeholders engaged through interviews and workshops
- 1 technology review report
- 1 board presentation