A week in the life of... a delivery manager

In the afternoon I visited Brockwell Green, another development site that is coming to completion, to take final handovers.

The site is made up of 49 units where construction started in March 2020. It had a number of challenges – including, of course, COVID-19, but also a mineshaft, which meant that we had to apply for revised planning approval. This delayed the construction of eight of the houses on this development.

As I have watched tenants move in over the past month it has been extremely rewarding to see the positive impact the homes in our Affordable Homes Programme are already making. The first tenant in this development told me that living there has really changed his family’s lives. Hearing feedback like this makes the challenges during the build phase all worth it.

Wednesday

I do love being out on site and seeing the developments progress, however this week is the end of the 2021-22 financial year so that means I have a lot of reports to finalise. We have three development sites for affordable rent reaching practical completion, which all have funding from Homes England.

Today I focused on reporting, including updating the monthly KPIs for our contractors, which are included in our performance pack and development committee papers.

I processed defects on our defect portal that were raised during my site visits earlier this week and I filed certificates from the handovers. 

Finally, I checked all our scheme details were correct on the Homes England Investment Management System and then processed our grant claim – the last one of the financial year, so I can now take a breath!

Thursday

As the sites come to completion, I work very closely with our housing team to answer queries during the allocation process. I spent my morning responding to a few queries that came in following viewings this week.

The most common question is always about how big the space is for all the white goods in the kitchens. As our new house types are gas free, we also try to point out at the viewing stage that if they have a gas cooker they would need to leave that behind.

As these houses are full of technology linked with the carbon-saving measures, we have worked hard on making sure the information provided to tenants is easy to understand.

We wanted to streamline the process of handovers a couple of years ago and COVID-19 forced us to look at that more urgently to minimise face-to-face contact. We produced a welcome video to take tenants through the equipment in their home, which was well-received, so we have continued to provide these for our tenants on the day they move in along with supporting leaflets.

Friday

This morning I processed invoices from some of our consultants for payment to make sure our project cash flows are all up to date. I then reviewed and closed down compliance actions from our internal technical assurance team.

As part of introducing these brand-new house types to Sunderland, we have an open day planned for next week where we have invited local councillors to the development to see the houses up close and to showcase the high-quality features that are included.

I met with the rest of the affordable development team this afternoon to talk through the key information we want to highlight during the event.

I ended the week preparing welcome boxes for tenants moving into their new homes next week.