Home buy task management overview
In responding to a tenant's application to buy their rented home under the 'Right to Buy', 'Right to Acquire' or 'Social Home Buy' schemes, any number of activities will need to be triggered in order to progress the submission through to a satisfactory outcome. Depending on the details and background to the application, any number of separate tasks may be required, and these potentially quite varied in nature. Typically, the process of documenting and responding to a home buy application will constitute the creation of a single case, and the inherent activities - the defined tasks - will be a series of discrete and chronological actions, categorised into progressive stages. These are then carried out by the allocated case owner within a specified timeframe, closely prescribed by government legislation. Each case must have at least one stage, but invariably might constitute several different home buy stages, each with quite separate tasks aligned to the nature and complexity of the parent case. To maximise the efficient progression of home buy cases, it might be acceptable to conduct some tasks in parallel i.e. the completion of one task being independent of another. Conversely, some tasks may be inextricably linked and therefore dependency rules must exist to define the task relationships and any in-built time lags i.e. dictating the commencement of one task in relation to the completion of its predecessor.
Any number of tasks can be created on the system, mapping the constituent elements of all likely home buy case scenarios to the progressive stages. These tasks would typically be created in advance, as part of the home buy configuration process, and then linked to different stages, as required. A single task - perhaps generic in nature - can be linked to multiple stages but can only appear once within the same stage. In the event that an individual task needs to be replicated within the same home buy stage, a clone of the original task definition must first be created and added to the stage. Simply by adding the task definition to the stage workflow, an end user is able to map out the critical path for the progression of an individual home buy case scenario through any combination of tasks. Thus, when a new home buy case is created in response to a formal home buy application, those tasks linked to the workflow path will be triggered automatically for each activated stage. Naturally, there will always be instances where the specific circumstances of a case demand that additional tasks be included; hence, these can easily be added manually, provided they exist within the stage type definition.
Task ownership always mirrors that of the overarching case, which can be allocated to a specific user account and their immediate line manager upon first creation, but then reassigned whilst in progress to take account of workload, staff absence, subject matter expertise, etc.
Separate help articles have been created for each key aspect of home buy task management, including:
In addition, separate help articles focus on the progression of home buy tasks, specifically: