What’s the most effective way to manage technical projects such as deliveries, redeliveries and purchase inspections? Nope – it’s not picking up the phone trying to find the person that happens to know what that latest status is. It’s not shuffling through paperwork or spreadsheets, either. It’s time to set aside manual, time intensive project management activities and adopt the right tool to streamline your operations.
Imagine a world where technical project tasks, status and interactions can be managed seamlessly online with all the information you need at your fingertips; that’s the power of the LeaseWorks Technical Projects (“Tech Projects”) solution which enables you to capture critical project information including project dates, project status, related assets and related leases.
Consider a pre-purchase aircraft evaluation. Purchasing an aircraft is a complex process and so is the evaluation of the general condition of the aircraft under consideration. The purchase process can be high pressure and quick paced; any errors in the process can be costly with possible regulatory and insurance implications. It is critical to maintain complete and accurate checklists for all project types to facilitate thorough and systematic progression through a project.
Effectively managing tasks associated with a technical project is central to managing the overall project both in terms of scope, budget and time. Tracking tasks associated with checklist items and tracking ad-hoc tasks is important along with the ability to manage task due dates, task owners, task risk assessment and any issues associated with tasks.
A pre-purchase aircraft inspection may uncover necessary engineering modifications related to regulatory compliance, documentation discrepancies and customer compliance. Alternatively, a technical project involving a shop visit may require tracking of specific shop visit items including airworthiness directives, service bulletins and open item lists.
A successful technical project needs to be completed on time and within budget. An effective technical projects management tool allows for the creation of a budget at a project level and at a detailed line level. Line level budget items may include budgeting for consultants, regulatory costs, maintenance and technical documentation.
Assembling your project team, defining project team member roles (e.g. project manager, technical consultant, technical manager, marketing manager), managing team workload and capturing team member contact information is vital for specifying project roles and responsibilities and facilitating effective project communication. In addition, the ability to log the history of email, phone call, virtual and in person interactions between your team members and third parties provides a valuable history of project activities.
Monitor projects using a user friendly dashboard where projects are color coded based on the state of the project – on track, at risk or delayed. The dashboard provides key information to project stakeholders to expedite the decision making process and assist with remediating project delays and mitigating project risks.
At LeaseWorks we are obsessed with building software to solve customer problems. The LeaseWorks Technical Projects solution has been developed by our team of industry experts to give you the edge to stand out from your competitors.
When you buy a software product, you typically think about whether or not its feature set can address your present needs. But it’s even more important that its upcoming capabilities support your needs into the future. The last thing you want is to adopt a product that is core to your operations that doesn’t evolve with you.
That’s why LeaseWorks maintains a quarterly release schedule.
Structuring around regular release cycles forces us to build a clean, modular software architecture. And it makes us keep our foot on the accelerator. It’s just human nature to ease up when your deadline is further into the future. Most exciting to us, it provides opportunities to delight our customers.
No software engineer likes to think there are mistakes in their code, but the reality is that it happens. Larger bugs are, of course, corrected immediately with patches. And with a quick release cadence, we can quickly get to the cosmetic issues as well.
Conditions in our professional and personal lives have never changed so suddenly as they did in 2020. The entire world had to pivot very quickly. And in our industry this meant, for one thing, more rent deferral or restructuring requests from airlines to lessors. To support this sudden influx, LeaseWorks was able to deliver a structured deal process in March 2020 to surface key information around such requests, speed up approvals and record decisions. This couldn’t have happened on a yearly or longer release schedule.
As we work with you to tailor your instance of LeaseWorks to the needs of your team, we continuously come across new ideas for tools and functionality. These come as direct requests from you and also through our customer success managers who see where you might have hit a roadblock in your process. During these interactions, our product managers see common threads that run across those requests and these themes lead to general product features. But even when they are specific bits of functionality for a single customer, we can deliver them quickly because there’s always a release just around the corner.
Like most products today, LeaseWorks isn’t a siloed piece of software. It’s just part of your technology stack and it needs to play well with others. Being built on top of the world’s leading cloud platform (force.com from Salesforce), this is especially true for LeaseWorks. When Salesforce makes an update, we can usually adapt to it before their change even goes live, avoiding any bumps in the road for our customers. And when related integrations change, we can quickly adapt to those too. When a partner adds new features, we can pass them through to you quickly and even build functionality on top to give you even more power.
Let’s face it. Nobody is right all the time and LeaseWorks is no exception. When we do not get a feature just right, we reach out for customer feedback to guide us forward. And with quarterly releases, we’re just a few months away from making that new tool everything you need and everything we had hoped it could be.
We’d like to share our process with you! We hope this transparency will make us even easier to work with and also confirm to you our commitment to steady, relevant product expansion and improvement.
The core functionality of LeaseWorks is built upon years of collective experience the team has in working with and for lessors and airlines. Our product team hails from both sides of the aviation leasing equation. This means that they’re intimately familiar with the work you need to accomplish and the tasks you need to get done every day.
Their experience helps with future features too, but there’s an even more important factor… you.
As we work with you, our CSMs, product managers and even developers keep their eyes and ears open. We take note of what you tell us about your pain points and we pay attention as you use the LeaseWorks system. We see where the interface might be leaving you confused. We notice when you go outside of LeaseWorks to leverage additional tools and resources. And we try to create new modules to help you automate the process end to end.
We capture all these ideas in an Asana, each one tagged with customer names, product modules and functionality zones. Once per quarter, the product team comes together to evaluate our list of feature requests and create a prioritized list for inclusion in the next release.
A feature idea from six months ago might get bumped in favor of a request you made just yesterday. We strike a balance between features that have broad appeal across the industry and filling the specific needs of our existing customer base.
The product managers then create product specifications that outline the functionality, UI, behavior and user experience of each included feature. Detailed specs ensure we’ve thought the concept through and structured these new tools in the best possible way.
After these specs are refined through a cooperation among product management, engineering and LeaseWorks management, they’re sent out to our team of advisors for their input. And, whenever possible, we discuss them with LeaseWorks customers as well to get their insight and unique view. This highly collaborative approach allows us to incorporate the most comprehensive view of the market need. Then, our developers get to work!
Along the way our devops team is planning for a seamless rollout and our product managers peek in from time to time to make sure everything is coming out exactly the way we want it. When development is complete, our quality assurance agents test all features thoroughly before they’re deployed. Finally, our post-deployment process kicks in to catch any unforeseen implementation issues.
So, there you have it. Those are the highlights of how our feature development process works and why we believe it will ensure that LeaseWorks is a valuable and integral part of your asset management process for years to come!