The team wished to move away from a referrals based approach to a consultative approach.

They wanted to retain casework as a central feature of their activity, and to record their work simply and without fuss. It was important that they should move away from purely recording casework - but what should they do?

They decided to organise their work into projects.

This mean that they could record work against individual projects.

Casework was just one project!

Their INSET work was another project - this seemed to be the answer.

As the idea matured they realised that the notion of a project could be expanded to provide another teir in their management analytical structure. All the work an EP did could be 'counted' - including such items as unavoidable travelling - as part of what was 'supplied' with a project.

Then came the idea of grouping projects so that they could be managed as sub-projects.

Finally it was realised that target setting could now be done for projects, sub-projects and individual pieces of work. Evaluation could also be done at that level.

This aspect caused some concern.

Then the idea of integrating the projects with the casework database took shape - and it became clear that the casework data would automatically integrate with the projects data - in fact it would generally be the same data, where the casework was automatically associated with a project, using the case context.

Admin staff would plan and schedule consultation, and meetings - and automatically register these on the case work database - and just a minor change means that this is also on the projects database!

Then it was noticed that everything an EP did was counted - and so why not have the EP diaries on the projects database? The same information would be in both!

By allowing the projects database to interface with the corporate diary management system (Outlook) it became possible to reduce data entry still further.

Finally - making all this available - Use the Internet!

It was decided that using an web based approach would give everyone access - and there were spinoffs!

The schools could log into the application and see their visits diaries. They could analyse their visits according to the needs of their agreements with the EP Service.

EPs working in schools could access casework data from schools and elsewhere.

Their approach has been supported by the Bright Systems Limited Educational Psychology System.

This is a project based integrated casework manager, with tools and flexibility to achieve most of the requirements outlined above, and the capacity to do much much more - in fact the opportunities for improvement are endless.