Berkshire Hathaway HomeService

Type: Web App Development - Conversion Portal

Industry: Real Estate Brokerage

Duration: 5 months [2012]

Role: Project Lead

(contracted through BrandActive, a

3rd party consultancy firm)

Situation

The requirement to renegotiate and retain contracts with almost 400 franchisees over a 3 year period meant completely rethinking and reengineering the Franchisee intake processing.

The existing BHHS support team of 3 staff, in a normal year, processed only 15-20 new, or re-negotiated franchisee contracts each year, as well as providing other value-added services. The rebranding meant this volume of renegotiated franchisees would increase to 125+ per year; requiring a potential staff up and training of 15 new staff if things were left in their current state. The projected cost and training of this staff-up was unreasonable and unsustainable.

We proposed the development of a web-based conversion portal application that would streamline the intake process for Franchisees signing up with the new BHHS brand. From an internal BHHS standpoint, the tool would streamline the tracking and intake of Franchisees, automate required document requests, confirm contract and intake stage progress, track automated checklists, streamline approvals and incentive payment authorizations and provide overall conversion tracking and projections by month. This latter piece was essential for avoiding key staff resource over-booking, and having BHHS executives available for converted Franchisee rebranding launch events.

The application development cost was a fraction of what staffing up would require; and provided the level of control, monitoring, tracking and overall progress reporting that would otherwise need to be done manually. The number of franchisee's and moving parts involved, would have made this manual tracking very difficult.

[Please also see BHHS Case Study for additional background]

Challenge

The challenges were many. Building the business case; getting stakeholder buy-in including Franchisee input; mapping the current, complex intake process; quickly defining application development specifications; going out to tender and rapidly getting the winning vendor on board, and the project launched as quickly as possible in order to meet a projected 4 1/2 month development window.

During the RFP process, three of the six vendors invited chose not to bid based on the extremely tight development window. Their feeling was that development for the project scope, as defined, would normally take between 7-9 months.

Results

Within 8 week, working closely with the Client's IT group and key business owners, we built the necessary business case; gained key stakeholder and executive approval; and built and refined the new application functional requirements and development specs to a sufficient detail to go out to tender. A winning vendor, with an excellent reputation and who was willing to take on the development activities within the short 4 1/2 month window was selected to partner with.

Using an Agile development process, through eight 2-week sprints we were able to accelerate development. Additionally, we were able to leverage open source and existing functional modules that the vendor had built previously to speed development. Acting as the project facilitator we played a critical role in moving the project along, ensuring both client and the vendor were extremely responsive, and acted as negotiator and mediator when inevitable issues came up. With a great deal of effort we delivered the web portal tool in 5 months, in time for the vast majority of Franchisees to use, with a phased delivery of non-critical enhancements and reporting four weeks later.

In the end, through the portal's process automation, things like triggered notifications, on-line scheduling/tracking, and checklists dramatically reduced the Franchisee hand-holding required, and streamlined the process dramatically. Staffing increased by only 2 intake coordinators (to a total of 5); and on average start-to-finish duration time for processing Franchisees was reduced by 25-30%, with much less BHHS staff involvement day-to-day. The pipeline reporting that the system provided, was also invaluable for keeping control and helping to schedule Franchisee launches with the new brand in any given month. This allowed schedules to be adjusted as needed, ensuring that both BHHS executives were available for Franchisee rebrand launch events; and avoiding bottlenecks for key BHHS staff resources in any given month (i.e. training resources, IT staff, account staff, customer service, etc.).