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Staff Spotlight: Kevin Romani-Brady

As October unfurls its crisp, golden tapestry and the year draws ever closer to its end, it’s the perfect time to kick off another chapter of our Staff Spotlight series – a delightful journey via which we introduce you to the passionate individuals who contribute to making Mobysoft the social housing sector’s most trusted data analytics partner. This month sees us catch up with pre-sales consultant Kevin Romani-Brady, a man with a wealth of social housing experience behind him who’s now one of Mobysoft’s driving forces when it comes to delivering an invaluable service to both internal and external stakeholders.

How did you come to work in social housing?

I joined Anchor Trust (Anchor Hannover) in 2006 as a temp contact centre agent and then spent almost 9 years working across various roles from allocations, repairs, rent collection, and ultimately as an application support officer in IT.

Describe yourself in 3 words:

Collaborative. Passionate. Loyal.

Prior to his career within social housing, Kevin served in the Core of Royal Engineers for 4 years

Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and your past experience within the social housing sector?

Starting in the contact centre was a baptism of fire and honestly after my first week I would never have guessed that  I would go on to spend 17 years working in social housing. I spent a considerable amount of time trying to get the most out of the systems and processes at hand, so that I could really maximise the benefit that we could deliver to many people as possible. I think my time in allocations, repairs and rent taught me so many different things but above all else it taught me that at that when on a call with a customer, their specific problem, at that moment in time, was most likely the biggest and most stressful thing they were facing and so if I could ease that stress even just a little then I should strive to do so.

This experience naturally led to a move into IT where I could devise and strategies ways to improve process to ultimately improve lives. I carried these experiences forward to Civica where I implemented and designed the HMS and forward onto NEC (where I did the same), and now to Mobysoft where I can really ensure we implement our ‘tech for good’ ethos.

What does your role at Mobysoft entail?

As a pre-sales consultant, my role is to ensure that we are engaging with the correct organisations that can really benefit from our services. Once engaged, I ensure that they understand our offering and the benefits it brings to them. It’s vital that we ensure organisations will get the most value from Mobysofts products and that we achieve the aim of improving the end customers experience. The other part of my role is to look at the challenges of onboarding to ensure that we have as much information to make the process as seamless and easy for all parties involved.

I also host our repairs webinar series and represent Mobysoft at the various conferences and events the company exhibits at.

What is the most interesting part of your job?

I am a people person, so I absolutely love engaging with an audience, whether that’s via a new sales engagement, webinar, or on the road at conferences and events. It’s also amazing to see the great work our product teams do to improve our technology offerings and to really be at the cutting edge of design ingenuity.

What are your biggest challenges at the moment?

My challenges are the same as my customers; increased scrutiny from the regulator, smaller budgets but bigger demand, a greater focus on disrepair, and the issue of damp and mould create the perfect storm for repairs services. It’s a storm we can help them navigate however, with high quality data insights.

What’s the most meaningful part of your job?

I am usually engaged with a customer from the very first meeting, so when a customer finally goes live and starts to reap the benefits of our technology it really does feel like a job well done.

Not doing things by halves attire-wise for the Mobysoft Summer Party

How do you measure the success of the outcomes directly influenced via your role?

Realistically you have to take each engagement meeting to meeting. Did we achieve our objectives? Do we move onto the next stage of the process? Is the customer fully informed of the next steps and the overall plan to move from where we are to a successful deployment?

What would you say are the biggest challenges faced by social landlords in the current climate?

Right now, I believe ‘doing more with less’ is the biggest challenge. Organisations are seeing budgets slashed whilst the regulator and other public bodies are asking for more. Customer expectations are on the rise (and rightly so!), yet with rising costs and a shortage of employees willing to work in an ‘unfashionable’ sector it means that organisations struggle to meet the expectations.

Working on anything interesting at the moment?

We have just launched our Damp and Mould initiative which will hopefully help organisations to face this winters D&M epidemic and come out of the other side smiling.

How would you describe Mobysoft and what it does to the uninitiated?

Mobysoft provides data insights solutions across income and assets – that’s the tag line anyway. Mobysoft is so much more than that though, we really do strive every day to ensure our customers (and their customers) get the best out of our solutions. Our platforms actually improve the lives of the end user and that is something we can be very proud of.

If you could wave a magic wand and change one aspect of the social housing sector overnight, what would it be?

I wish that the mainstream media would report on more of our social housing heroes instead of constantly focusing on the negatives. There are so many people doing so many wonderful things every day in social housing and that really should be celebrated.

What has been your proudest achievement in Housing?

I think designing and delivering solutions that actually change lives and make homes safer, taking my ideas from lines in spreadsheets to modules that are used every ay by thousands of housing professionals.

Excelling artistically at a recent Mobysoft ‘Sip & Paint’ team-building event

What has been your proudest achievement at Mobysoft?

Pre-sales didn’t really exist as a function before I joined Mobysoft and now we are delivering an invaluable service to both internal and external stakeholders.

What are your other passions outside housing?

I am an avid reader and have an unhealthy ‘to read’ pile that seems to grow by the day. I really need my own library!

How do you unwind after work?

I have two children so after work consists of a roundup of the day’s action followed by cooking tea, homework, and the myriad of after school activities (rugby, ice skating). Once the kids are set me and my wife will relax with the latest tv series – currently we are on the last season of Mad Men.

What is your ideal holiday?

We love to explore and so every holiday has a packed agenda of adventures. We love history so a castle or another form of ruins is always on the cards, but that’s well balanced with walks on the beach and of course enjoying the local food and culture.

That’s it for what is the tenth edition of Staff Spotlight this year so far (two more to go!). If you enjoyed it, then please do head back to these very pages at the same time next month when we’ll be getting to know another Mobysoft staffer a little better.

Dean Quinn
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