De Woonplaats is a housing corporation based in Enschede, managing over 20,000 affordable homes in the eastern Netherlands. They use SelfGuide to better secure knowledge and processes.
De Woonplaats is a housing corporation based in Enschede, managing over 20,000 affordable homes primarily in Enschede and the Achterhoek region. In a rapidly changing world, De Woonplaats aims to stay at the forefront with its 220 employees. A key component of this is a professional and progressive Information & Automation (I&A) department.
The I&A department of De Woonplaats is responsible for advising on information technology, IT process optimization, and functional management. Sander Hilgerink, Team Leader of I&A and part of this department since 2005, explains that the department's responsibilities have changed over the years, bringing new challenges:
“We realized that we have a wealth of specialized, technical, and functional knowledge, but this knowledge is not secured and centrally available. Much of the knowledge is often in our heads or stored in decentralized documents.”
The ultimate goal for the I&A department at De Woonplaats is to ensure that everyone within the team has access to the same knowledge and information.
The I&A department of De Woonplaats had few instructions available. Additionally, they did not want to work with static instructions like PDF documents. With SelfGuide, employees create and maintain step-by-step instructions for all software applications in a uniform format. The 10-member I&A department of De Woonplaats evaluated SelfGuide positively based on its compatibility with the software application landscape, added value, and tools that could potentially serve the same purpose.
The goal of the I&A department at De Woonplaats is to secure all knowledge and processes in instructions within SelfGuide within a year. Securing means that knowledge and processes are documented and made available for reuse, ensuring that products and/or services can continually be offered at a high level of quality. Sander Hilgerink explains how the I&A department expects to achieve this goal:
“The rule is that whenever someone performs a task, such as a management task, for which there is no existing instruction, that task must be carried out with the SelfGuide recorder running in the background to create an instruction on the spot”
Within De Woonplaats, the use of SelfGuide runs smoothly. Instructions are primarily created for the core software applications Dynamics Navision and Dynamics Empire. In practice, it is also evident that more and more instructions are being created, which is increasingly securing knowledge and processes.
“With SelfGuide, you can get started right away. Creating an instruction is incredibly fast. Additionally, instructions are easy to find thanks to the search function, tags, software application features, and user guides.”
Since the addition of text annotations within an instruction, significantly fewer steps are needed to explain something.
When Sander Hilgerink is asked for his opinion on SelfGuide, he responds
“SelfGuide is truly an addition, something we were looking for. In practice, you see that a new colleague now resolves my reports using an instruction. I never hear that anything is unclear.”
The concrete value of SelfGuide for De Woonplaats is realized by securing and centrally making available the specialized, technical, and functional knowledge of the I&A department. Previously, knowledge was not secured, and creating an instruction took a lot of time. With SelfGuide, these problems are a thing of the past.
Within De Woonplaats, an increasing number of employees are using SelfGuide. An important part of the organization-wide rollout is creating instructions and user guides for the core software application Dynamics Empire. This demonstrates the added value of SelfGuide for the entire organization. Nevertheless, it was a deliberate choice to start on a small scale with the I&A department. Hilgerink emphasizes:
“We are particularly interested in the TOPdesk integration and the standard instructional material for software applications like Office. We encourage end users to submit reports through TOPdesk, and we regularly receive questions about support related to Office”
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