Seasoned users of ECINS, Waveney District Council in Suffolk have extended their use of ECINS from ASB case management to include the running of projects and Neighbourhood Plans.

Similar to Parish Plans, Neighbourhood Plans were introduced in the Localism Act 2011 and are effectively a community coming together to create a statutory document that is used alongside the planning process.   Identifying the  priorities for land use over the next 10-15 years.   

The Council support the community to build their Neighbourhood Plans for their area which involves compiling and recording information, project management, liaison with other stakeholders and other administrative tasks.

East Suffolk Community Manager Rachel Tucker, who has extensive experience in using ECINS for ASB and Troubled Families decided to run the district’s Summer Activity Plan on the system and the success of the project led Rachel to suggest to the Community Safety Team that it could be adopted for all of the district’s Neighbourhood Plans and events.

Rachel said “Utilising ECINS in this way is a great learning opportunity for the whole team because it gives everyone the ability to see exactly what happens with a specific project from start to finish.  Each team member can access and upload to the system and all interactions are visible so even if a team member is away from the office, others can see what is happening.

“It holds all the contact logs so we know who is involved and who has agreed to what and we can attach all related documents so we have all files in one place.  Another benefit of running the Neighbourhood Plans on ECINS is that we have a recognised and recorded format for each event so it’s easy for us to either replicate it or review lessons learned to make future events even more successful”.

Jo McCallum who is also part of the Community Team said  Using ECINS to case manage Neighbourhood Plans has provided a valuable resource. All the documents are in one place and readily accessible for those who need to find information.   

“I am responsible for organising the annual Holocaust Memorial  Civic commemorations and have used ECINS for the last two years  to project manage the organisation of the events.  We are also using ECINS as part of working on the refurbishment of a building to become a Community Centre in Bungay and as we now have responsibility for Health under our remit we also organise a lot of  partnership events. ECINS is a useful tool for ensuring all information is kept in one place.

“It is really beneficial for us as it allows all of the team to work together.  Without ECINS it was often difficult to locate specific bits of information as everything was held on each individual’s own PC.  In ECINS it is all there in one place and we can all see it in chronological order.  Having the ability to set tasks and make action plans is also really useful as a learning tool.”