Senior Associate, HMIS TA

HMIS Senior Associate

As a HMIS Senior Associate you will support Abt's extensive portfolio of Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) Technical Assistance initiatives, as well as other projects, as needed. You will work with local communities and federal grant recipients to help them improve data collection, analysis, and data quality capacities in locally managed Homeless Management Information Systems (HMIS). You will also be expected to engage as a thought leader both internally and with the local communities and federal grant recipients, in a variety of capacities.

For example, you will contribute to work groups and mini teams, as a developer and/or reviewer of products, tools and resources to support communities in their efforts to end homelessness.

Core Responsibilities

• Designing tools and guidance to help communities to develop and implement a robust HMIS database.
• Developing data collection guidance and strategies to help communities use data from HMIS, point-in-time counts, housing inventory counts, and other sources to inform homelessness system design, measure performance, and model improvement opportunities.
• Creating data dashboards to support local and federal data efforts, ideally in Tableau
• Developing programming specifications to analyze and generate reports from HMIS data (most likely leveraging SQL programming languages) to support local and national reporting and use of HMIS data for local homeless system planning.
• Facilitating knowledge sharing to promote cross-learning within Abt and externally (e.g., communities, HUD, and partners) to ensure all of those working to end homelessness can cultivate and apply the most effective strategies possible.
• Providing technical assistance to help HMIS Lead Agencies and Continuum of Care (CoCs) improve their data collection, data quality and reporting practices in HMIS.
• Building and maintaining relationships with federal, state, and local government officials and TA recipients; working collaboratively as part of and in leading teams; exercising initiative and leading innovation within the field; and communicating effectively with a diverse range of partners.

What We Value

• Bachelor's Degree + Twelve years of relevant experience, or Master's Degree + Ten years of relevant experience, or PhD+ Eight years of relevant experience
• Technical expertise in HMIS, including knowledge of the HMIS Data Standards, HUD XML and CSV schemas, and HMIS federal partner requirements
• Experience programming HMIS software functionality, especially related to conformation with HUD Data Standards and Reporting Requirements and functionality (e.g. features to support community-level inventory management and coordinated entry implementation).
• Experience with data migration, data integration, moving data from one HMIS platform to a data repository, or moving data from one HMIS platform to another HMIS platform
• Deep knowledge of and experience with the Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) and Longitudinal Systems Analysis (LSA) processes and requirements
• In-depth programming experience using SAS, SQL, particularly to program reports for HMIS or similar client-level datasets (experience with Python or R also a plus)
• Strong data visualization experience, ideally in Tableau
• Experience analyzing administrative data to understand racial, gender and other subgroup disparities
• Experience analyzing and presenting HMIS data to CoC and community leaders to help them understand homelessness, system performance, and system needs and to support planning processes focused on system improvement and equity
• Experience partnering with people with lived experience of homelessness in the design of data collection systems and efforts, interpretation of data, planning, decision-making and implementation processes.
• Demonstrated ability to center equity in daily work and functions
• Demonstrated success managing an HMIS, including work as an HMIS System Administrator for a local CoC
• Demonstrated success in implementing an HMIS Data Quality Management Program (DQMP) or equivalent training and support for users of HMIS
• Excellent problem solving, escalation, analytical, collaboration, listening, verbal…