Home buy task maintenance overview
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 created. Each home buy case generated in this way relates to one or more stages - chronological management phases of an applicant's submission - which in turn comprise one or more related tasks, and it is these tasks that define how the case will be progressed. Any number of discrete tasks can be linked to a home buy case, although an individual task can only appear once within the same stage. Where multiple tasks are required, identical in nature, separate task definitions must be created for each instance. In structuring all the activities that are relevant to a home buy case, tasks can be added manually at the point of recording a tenant's expression of interest, or they can be created automatically by virtue of their existence within the stage 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. These task attributes and restrictions are all configured within the overarching stage definition, where the predecessor task hierarchy and required lag period - the delay between dependent tasks - are all determined.
All home buy related tasks activated as a consequence of raising a case can be service level driven and form an integral part of a wider Service Level Agreement (SLA). Within each home buy task, 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 task level must fall within the overall SLA relevant to each parent stage, 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 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 home buy case, the ownership of the associated tasks is automatically transferred from the parent case entry fields, specifically an individual user account along with their immediate line manager.
Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of home buy task maintenance, including: