Estate management task maintenance overview

The foundation of the estate management module is the creation and deployment of custom tasks that enable all preparatory work, risk assessment procedures, inspection visits and actions - indeed any activity conducted by a housing organisation in accordance with their estate services policy - to be broken down into constituent elements. This standardised approach to managing all inherent procedures through the use of clearly defined tasks underpins the drive towards delivering best of breed estate services, meaning that all case management activities - in particular the engagement of resident groups in all decision making opportunities - can be executed consistently. Any number of discrete tasks can be linked to an estate management case, with a specific attribute governing whether each can appear more than once within the same execution plan. In structuring all the activities that are relevant to a case, tasks can be added manually at the point of need, or they can be linked automatically by virtue of their existence within an underlying workflow path. Dictated by the nature of the assigned tasks, dependencies can be configured between them to restrict the point at which related tasks are commenced. Recurrent tasks can also be configured to facilitate specific activities that need to be repeated over a defined period, or until such time as a particular outcome is achieved.

All related tasks activated as a consequence of raising an estate management case can be service level driven and form an integral part of a wider Service Level Agreement (SLA). Inherited within each estate management task are three defined components of SLA compliance tracking: amber warning period, follow-on escalation and target completion exceeded. Robust system validation rules ensure that proposed target dates are synchronised, and therefore SLA thresholds defined at individual task level are combined, and the overall result compared against the equivalent end-to-end latency period linked to the parent inspection type. Once an SLA indicator is reached during the progression of an estate management case, the system can be configured to dispatch an automatic alert to individual user accounts that are associated through the task definition escalation rules, notifying them of the situation. User accounts can be linked directly to the SLA notification process or by association through their membership of an allocated role. The next progression phase can also be controlled through a follow-on rule i.e. the actions to be undertaken in the instance where an escalated task is still outstanding after a defined period.

At the point of raising a new estate management case, the default ownership for each associated task is automatically transferred from the definition, specifically one or more individual user accounts together with any additional role permissions.

Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of estate management task maintenance, including:

• To create a new estate management task definition
• To add an information field to an estate management task definition
• To assign custom lookup values to an estate management task information field
• To allocate a role to an estate management task definition
• To allocate a user to an estate management task definition
• To add an SLA target to an estate management task definition