Lease Renewals Case Study
Buildium had significant faults with two central pieces of functionality that share a common theme of effective dated changes and preserving history: Rent and Lease Renewals. This particular project is focusing on the latter, Renewals had poor usage because ledgers were split upon renewal -- resulting in a broken history and missed charges -- and because of significant usability issues with the actual tracking and managing of renewals. This meant virtually all customers tracked renewals outside of the system, and had to use workaround to accomplish a critical and ubiquitous task. Major updates were needed to create a workflow that met users needs for tracking and could properly handle the financials on ledgers.
The project began with myself and the PM carrying out dozens of interviews to map out how the leasing process is performed outside of the system today, and identify any significant variations in the process. This became the lynchpin of the final design.
A handful of persons were defined to account for critical variations in process or size, so that all the major workflows could be accommodated, either through business logic, or more open-ended features that could be easily leveraged to fit any outliers.