Year-End Review: 3 Areas to Cover for Success in 2023

Tessa Author

Reviewing your team, tools, and resources while preparing for the new year allows you to align goals with your capabilities for guaranteed success.

“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” – Soren Kierkegaard

With the year-end approaching fast, it’s easy to compromise your 2023 preparations by foregoing a thorough review of your resources in favor of unfinished projects and looming deadlines.

The good news is that your annual review can be quick and effective when you know where to focus your energy. The focus is on the tools and resources in this article, yet it’s important to note that there are several moving parts to a well-performing Lease Administration function.

Let’s make sure we’re on the same page with the definitions and purpose of the assessment before we get into the specifics. (Running analogy alert!)

Lease Administration is a Marathon

The journey to streamline your Lease Administration function sometimes may feel like a marathon through the wilderness… to the top of Mount Everest. Just kidding! Running to the top of Everest is way easier.

To continue with a marathon race analogy, your process is the race course (the trail you follow), while department goals represent the distance markers along the way and, ultimately, the finish line.

The landscape for this adventure is your company's operational structure and processes, which establish boundaries, clearings, and obstacles for you to navigate.

Finally, the team, tools, and resources (TTR) support you in this adventure and are the topic of this article. In the same way a pair of shoes can make or break your race experience, a real estate database and other tools can impact the speed of your progress toward your lease administration function goals.

You move forward to your goals by taking action steps (like running) in your laid-out process (the race course), yet to ensure you’re moving in the right direction and optimally using your resources, most runners use a fancy GPS watch.

This watch is the assessment process. It helps you keep an eye on your time and distance covered, distance to go, heart rate, and other metrics that help you complete this marathon. Checking the stats on your GPS watch often makes it easier to course correct, while looking at it too much can be distracting and prevent you from taking the next step.

Evaluate Your Team and Gear Annually

It’s beneficial to measure and review your progress many times per year. Yet, it’s enough to assess your team, tools, and resources annually or if a process breakdown occurs. For our running analogy, I’m talking about the runner(s), their gear, and the supporting team, if any.

The runner(s), with their equipment and support, enable the department’s progress toward department objectives, so reviewing those while developing your next year’s objectives allows you to align goals with your capabilities to guarantee success (vs. setting unreasonable or irrelevant goals).

Below are the three primary groups of resources you need to function effectively. I explain the purpose of each group, items to consider during your review, and actions to take this month to make the upcoming year your best year yet.

Start with your Technology Tools

Technology tools are a huge component of how we do business and have a much broader effect on the function than any one person or process could. Start your assessment here since most tools affect multiple objectives.

When technology gadgets and applications operate optimally, so do we, and when they stall, jam, or freeze, they become a costly nuisance capable of derailing operations for the department. The goal is to recognize those issues before they evolve into the latter timely.

When examining your tech tool, identify what tasks are completed with each tool, whether it’s effective and liked by users (why or why not?), and what creates the biggest bottlenecks (aim for three or more). During your review, talk to as many users as possible for each tool to gain additional insight. Remember to use the magical follow-up question: “And, what else?” to help even the shyest colleagues open up.

For more details on the technology tools lease administrators need to succeed, read this Renting & Rolling article.

Study Your Team

In a successful function, you have “the right people in the right seats,” as said by Gino Wickman, author and productivity expert. The phrase means that you and others on your team are not only engaged and want to be in their roles but are also capable of doing the work well and timely.

Back to our running analogy, your team includes one or more runners and a support team. Runners perform a critical part of the process, like abstraction, managing vendors, and paying rent. Supporting team helps to enable the runners, like an assistant who sorts and scans the mail (which can be a full-time job when you have 6,000 locations), an IT developer in charge of the proprietary Real Estate database, or the manager who assigns and reviews work for the “running” team.

Study your team, observing and noting who’s on it, what everybody is doing, and how good they are at it. Then, talk to them to learn about their goals and aspirations, wins from this year, and challenges that may keep them from moving forward.

For those in the right place and excited about it yet could use some tech training, direct them to the support materials and resources for the tools, and for the Lease Administration training, consider the Lease Administration Academy, a comprehensive on-demand training and implementation program for a thriving lease management function.

If you’re a one-person show, get a backup so that you are not the only person in the entire company who knows how to do your job. Lease Administration is a critical business function that needs redundancy for risk management. Plus, you should be able to take time off during the rent roll weeks because things happen, like winning the lottery or your sister's wedding.

Finish with the Templates

The last step is to review the non-tech tools that help the people on your team take action using the technology tools you listed earlier, like your process guides, templates, and checklists.

People use tools differently, so you must understand which tools are available and what kind of users you have to develop an accommodating process and supporting tools.

Templates and checklists are the easiest forms of automation to reduce the time and effort required for repetitive activities and are often easy to implement. However, there are other ways to reduce the time it takes to complete your work. Learn more about time-saving strategies for busy lease administrators in this free eBook.

As you complete your month-end and year-end tasks this month, review the processes to identify any areas that could use a checklist or a template, like a template for a monthly report or the email you send to deliver that report to the users, for example. Ask yourself, “How often do I repeat this activity, and would it be easier (faster, more accurate) with a template?”

Remember, you’re not making any significant changes now but simply observing and becoming aware of what is happening and where the needs lie to help you identify and assign projects that are relevant, useful, and timely.

Don't get stuck in the past

Step into the new year with confidence, knowing exactly what you're working with because, in the words of Soren Kierkegaard, “life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” You can’t predict the future, but you can determine the next best steps toward your goals by analyzing past actions and present outcomes.

Using the information gained from this exercise will empower you to set appropriate milestones for the upcoming year and outline the steps to take come January. Don’t put it off! Schedule your assessment for tech tools today and use the Tech Tool workbook for inspiration to have your first draft done in an hour (including the time it takes you to read the article).

Categories: : Process Improvement