Home buy configuration management overview
The process of home buy management has a number of contributory factors that need to be configured at the outset in order to inform daily activities, operations and functions. These configuration components enable the housing organisation to define specific parameters in line with their own procedures and adherence to legal frameworks. Additional values and attributes can be appended to the records at any time, as required, although maintaining comprehensive information from the start will reap its own rewards. There are several key areas that fall under the category of home buy configuration management: escalation rule maintenance, task maintenance and stage maintenance.
Home Buy Escalation Rule Maintenance - All home buy activities within the control of the housing organisation, both directly and indirectly, can be service level driven and form an integral part of a wider Service Level Agreement (SLA). Escalation rules define the automatic events to be triggered in the instance where a task exceeds the SLA target, or reaches a predefined warning period. The escalation process would typically notify the case or task owner, and potentially members of a stakeholder group using customised communication templates. The escalation process is not just a one-off exercise but rather subsequent follow-on rules can be defined and triggered in the event that a task has stagnated beyond a defined period. Open tasks can therefore be continually tracked and actively progressed through to a successful outcome.
Home Buy Task Maintenance - A home buy task is a specific activity that must be undertaken as an outcome of an application received into the housing organisation under the 'Right to Buy', 'Right to Acquire' or 'Social Home Buy' schemes, from which a case has been generated. A discrete task could be, say, to review a completed application form, send an acknowledgement letter, liaise with another qualifying contact or arrange a follow-up meeting; indeed any single event that will help to structure and define the workflow of a case. All home buy tasks activated as a consequence of raising a new case can be service level driven and linked to escalation rules, such that a defined process is initiated in the event that their progression falls behind agreed targets. Within each home buy task, there are three key components of SLA compliance tracking: amber warning period, follow-on escalation and target completion exceeded.
Home Buy Stage Maintenance - A stage-focused approach to home buy case management supports a housing organisation's desire to ‘get it right first time’ and helps to group together related actions into chronological phases, ensuring full adherence to the prescribed framework for each scheme. Any number of customer-facing and internal stages can be created to suit the working practices of the housing organisation - admitting or denying applications, calculating sale prices, making offers, managing delays, etc. - and can be dovetailed with the legal requirements set out for the relevant scheme, or simply created in response to best practice recommendations. Each stage must contain a series of tasks, setting out the actions to be completed by the current case owner, and stages may in effect be inextricably linked, such that the completion of one stage would logically lead the end user to the activation of the next.
The increasing focus on delivering service excellence depends on the timely allocation of home buy cases to highly trained officers who possess an excellent understanding of government legislation and all influencing factors. To that end, Civica Cx Housing enables end users to configure allocation rules that are automatically applied to cases upon first creation, thus ensuring that ownership is passed to the most appropriate resource. Such rules are triggered based on the specific scheme type linked to each new case; where no rules apply, ownership preferences are specified on-the-fly.
Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of home buy configuration management, including: