Dylan Walls welcomed us with a great smile in the hip Bitprop offices in the centre of Cape Town. The company has made good progress in implementing some of the recommendations and ideas that the Brown IE team proposed, he told us. One of the other welcoming impacts is that Busi, the team’s navigator, got an opportunity through this assignment to carry out some independent work for Bitprop, gaining valuable professional experience. We are very pleased to see that the professional qualities of our navigators are recognised in this way.

In terms of addressing Operational Inefficiencies, Bitprop has started integrating previously disparate systems and has implemented a new maintenance management system. It has also established a feedback mechanism with tenants and achieved quicker response times, while also improving data collection.

Looking at the area of Data Management, Dylan explained that Bitprop is addressing the lack of coherent and centralized data. A hackathon with students was conducted to organise data, and a dashboard was developed with analytics capabilities. Dylan expects to see real positive outcomes resulting from these changes in the next 6 months.

Further down the line, Bitprop recognises that the issue of stakeholder misalignment, which is also connected to homeowner relationship management processes, requires longer-term attention, and Bitprop is planning to focus on that area within the coming year.

Dylan described the consulting process as one of the best he experienced: “I appreciated the hands-on intervention approach (…) and feel positive about future progress”.