Home buy stage maintenance overview
A stage-focused approach to home buy case management supports a housing organisation's desire to ‘get it right first time’ and promotes the drive towards a more streamlined plan to fulfilling the requirements of each government scheme, with robust services delivered by capable, well-trained staff around admitting or denying applications, calculating sale prices, making offers and managing delays. Any number of customer-facing and internal stages can be created to suit the working practices of the housing organisation: some can be dovetailed with the legal requirements set out for each scheme, whilst others can be created in line with best practice recommendations. For example, an initial custom stage within the 'Right To Buy' scheme could exist to support tenants in completing and submitting their applications; thus reducing the work involved in aborted submissions, as well as encouraging responsible, considered applications. A logical and subsequent stage would then be to focus on checking each received application form, with inherent tasks covering all elements of the rigorous verification procedures - the correct address of the property, the inclusion of all signatories, details of any previous tenancies, etc.
All home buy cases can be service level driven and form an integral part of a wider Service Level Agreement (SLA), controlled through their association to one or more stage definitions. Within each home buy stage, there are three key components of SLA compliance tracking: amber warning period, follow-on escalation and target completion exceeded. SLA targets that are defined at stage level must transcend the individual SLA targets for the related tasks, with robust system validation rules ensuring that proposed target completion dates are synchronised. Once an SLA indicator is reached, the system can be configured to dispatch an automatic alert to individual user accounts that are associated through the stage definition, 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 allocation of home buy tasks to a stage defines how the resulting case will be progressed. Any number of discrete tasks can be linked to a home buy stage although an individual task can only appear once. Where multiple tasks are required, identical in nature, separate task definitions must be created for each instance. Tasks can either be added to the stage definition and then activated manually at the point of need, or included within the workflow path, with automatic activation triggered when a new case is progressed to that particular stage. Upon raising a home buy case, the assigned ownership credentials are automatically transferred to each successive stage, specifically an individual user account along with their immediate line manager.
Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of home buy stage maintenance, including: