To: Muna Tarek(Lead Technical Staff) and Zinedine Abubakar(Purchasing DIR) From: Duha Sami(Exec Dir of Bus Operations?Main) Subject: Urgent Need for a new Reporting Mechanism For Maintenance Request Date: 10/25/22 CC: Zayna Izz Ud-Din (Exec Dir Of Finance and Planning) Muna and Zinedine, Hope the weekend went well for the both of you! I’m just reaching out today as I think we have an urgent operational need I’m uncertain how to fulfill and could you use your advice on? Over the last several weeks we have gotten some particularly scathing email and web feedback as well as some online reviews about maintenance requests not being submitted correctly or completed for our student apartment buildings near campus. Some of these have been excerpted or screen captured and shared online via social media and gone viral within our local population. My office has already had about two dozen calls from parents and students threatening either legal action or withholding of their rent payments until this situation is adequately addressed. Additionally, I got a polite email inquiry from the President of the University and we had a local newspaper reporter leave a voicemail… Before we contact anyone, I feel we need a plan. I would like to tell them we are initiating some sort of effort to address this problem and I was hoping that technology might be part of the answer here? As you are probably aware our sites maintenance foreman Chandra has complained for some time that our process for reporting maintenance issues has become severely outdated and inefficient. Currently we are still requiring our onsite student liaisons to work with their fellow residents to either fill out our paper form, email us, or call in the problem. This has resulted in lots of miscommunication and lost requests over the years. We need something that allows our student liaisons to submit a request for our tenants that doesn’t require us to give every student liaison full access to our maintenance database…like maybe a phone app? Say where they could look up the lease holder and submit the appropriate request. Is that doable? Thanks and I look forward to your suggestions/reply? Duha Sami Executive Director of Business Operations & Maintenance RED-FEATHER Apartment Holdings Inc. Typical, IL Duha, I am well and did have a great weekend! One of my staff shared some of the social media postings over the weekend that I was going to share with you later today in case you hadn’t seen them, but it seems you have…so, I understand why you would want to get have a solution before communicating outside the company… I think we can definitely find or develop a mobile app solution for this use case, but a business need like this one (and with this much at stake) should be reviewed properly. I suggest we launch a project to either develop or procure such an app. We have Flexible Tech Solutions (FTS) on contract for many of our medium to large IT needs and one of the services they offer is project management. I suggest we work with FTS to get a project manager assigned to assess our needs and spin up a project to implement a solution. With the previous in mind I’ve copied in our customer experience rep from FTS, Nina. Let’s see what she says about all of this? -Muna Muna, Good to hear from you! FTS would be happy to help with this need. Would it be possible to get a web conference together later this week so that we can start thinking through a project charter? From what I have so far it sounds like you have some specific needs that you’ve already identified, so I think a quick web conference will really help us flesh out what other objectives you have! Feel free to share anything additional that might help! -Nina Nina, After talking with Duha and Chandra I have a few more observations/details: 1. After talking it over they really like the mobile app idea, but we’ve never done one before. 2. We really want this web app to submit the service request direct to our maintenance database application that has a work queue. 3. It sounds like we’ll want to do a look up of the lease holder submitting the maintenance request at that will tell us both who submitted and which apartment/building we need be concerned about. 4. We need to think about how to deal with urgency of requests (not sure what they are thinking on that one)? I hope this gives you the additional detail you need? Thanks, -Muna 1. What would be project scope for this chain of emails? I need the project name, sponsor, project manager, project objective, project description, business benefits, project deliverables, and estimated project duration. Duha Sami-Exec Dir of Bus Operation/ Maint Muna Tarek-Lead Technical Staff Zinedine Abubakar-Purchasing Dir Zayna Izz Ud-Din-Exec Dir of Finance and Planning Nina Cooper-Customer Experience Rep, FTS Inc.
To: Muna Tarek(Lead Technical Staff) and Zinedine Abubakar(Purchasing DIR)
From: Duha Sami(Exec Dir of Bus Operations?Main)
Subject: Urgent Need for a new Reporting Mechanism For Maintenance Request
Date: 10/25/22
CC: Zayna Izz Ud-Din (Exec Dir Of Finance and Planning)
Muna and Zinedine,
Hope the weekend went well for the both of you! I’m just reaching out today as I think we have an urgent
operational need I’m uncertain how to fulfill and could you use your advice on?
Over the last several weeks we have gotten some particularly scathing email and web feedback as well as
some online reviews about maintenance requests not being submitted correctly or completed for our
student apartment buildings near campus. Some of these have been excerpted or screen captured and
shared online via social media and gone viral within our local population. My office has already had
about two dozen calls from parents and students threatening either legal action or withholding of their rent
payments until this situation is adequately addressed. Additionally, I got a polite email inquiry from the
President of the University and we had a local newspaper reporter leave a voicemail…
Before we contact anyone, I feel we need a plan. I would like to tell them we are initiating some sort of
effort to address this problem and I was hoping that technology might be part of the answer here?
As you are probably aware our sites maintenance foreman Chandra has complained for some time that our
process for reporting maintenance issues has become severely outdated and inefficient. Currently we are
still requiring our onsite student liaisons to work with their fellow residents to either fill out our paper
form, email us, or call in the problem. This has resulted in lots of miscommunication and lost requests
over the years. We need something that allows our student liaisons to submit a request for our tenants
that doesn’t require us to give every student liaison full access to our maintenance database…like maybe
a phone app? Say where they could look up the lease holder and submit the appropriate request. Is that
doable?
Thanks and I look forward to your suggestions/reply?
Duha Sami
Executive Director of Business Operations & Maintenance
RED-FEATHER Apartment Holdings Inc.
Typical, IL
Duha,
I am well and did have a great weekend!
One of my staff shared some of the social media postings over the weekend that I was going to share with
you later today in case you hadn’t seen them, but it seems you have…so, I understand why you would
want to get have a solution before communicating outside the company…
I think we can definitely find or develop a mobile app solution for this use case, but a business need like
this one (and with this much at stake) should be reviewed properly. I suggest we launch a project to
either develop or procure such an app. We have Flexible Tech Solutions (FTS) on contract for many of
our medium to large IT needs and one of the services they offer is project management. I suggest we
work with FTS to get a project manager assigned to assess our needs and spin up a project to implement a
solution.
With the previous in mind I’ve copied in our customer experience rep from FTS, Nina.
Let’s see what she says about all of this?
-Muna
Muna,
Good to hear from you! FTS would be happy to help with this need. Would it be possible to get a web
conference together later this week so that we can start thinking through a project charter?
From what I have so far it sounds like you have some specific needs that you’ve already identified, so I
think a quick web conference will really help us flesh out what other objectives you have! Feel free to
share anything additional that might help!
-Nina
Nina,
After talking with Duha and Chandra I have a few more observations/details:
1. After talking it over they really like the mobile app idea, but we’ve never done one before.
2. We really want this web app to submit the service request direct to our maintenance database
application that has a work queue.
3. It sounds like we’ll want to do a look up of the lease holder submitting the maintenance request at
that will tell us both who submitted and which apartment/building we need be concerned about.
4. We need to think about how to deal with urgency of requests (not sure what they are thinking on
that one)?
I hope this gives you the additional detail you need?
Thanks,
-Muna
1. What would be project scope for this chain of emails? I need the project name, sponsor, project manager, project objective, project description, business benefits, project deliverables, and estimated project duration.
Duha Sami-Exec Dir of Bus Operation/ Maint
Muna Tarek-Lead Technical Staff
Zinedine Abubakar-Purchasing Dir
Zayna Izz Ud-Din-Exec Dir of Finance and Planning
Nina Cooper-Customer Experience Rep, FTS Inc.
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