The purpose of this session is to present a novel way of working with partners to get more done in less time in a streamlined fashion.

This presentation will describe our approach to streamlining and prioritizing requests from 20 CoC and County staff in a dynamic way, and staffing this work.

As a state system administrator and HMIS lead agency for 10 CoC regions, we receive many competing requests, many of them complex, interconnected, and some of them contradictory.

This presentation will describe an approach to working with one large CoC who wanted to go all in with HMIS, using it as more than a compliance tool, but as a case management and service delivery tool. There are over 20 planners in this county and CoC, all with varying requests. The first half of the presentation will discuss the process of meeting with the managers, planners, and CoC staff to document HMIS needs, determine priorities, data sources, and goals for the coming year. Then using qualitative data analysis determined what needed to happen to move their ideas forward, who would be needed to make the changes, and what tasks fit together logically into distinct projects. We then engaged with them to get defined scope, deliverables from each side, and dynamic prioritization (and re-prioritization) of the projects.

The second half of the presentation will discuss our experiences with assigning staff resources to get the work done in partnership, lessons learned as a result, and what we were able to accomplish together. We, as the State System Administrator, experimented with bringing an external CoC partner onto our project team to streamline communication and bring parallel conversations together at project team meetings. We used the Scrum project management framework to allow the team to stay nimble as priorities shift, built in transparency for the tasks through regular reviews, and deliver iterative value, all while completing work most efficiently with limited resources.