Michigan Rental Development

Getting a rental development project approved in Michigan means clearing a stack of separate steps: a market study, an environmental study, legal review, a notice of intent to apply, an application, a construction review, a design review, and more. Each one generates documents, and a single application can carry well over a hundred across forty+ different types, with many versions of the same file. With all of it spread across email and SharePoint, no one had a single clear view of where a project stood or which version of a document was current, and the whole thing moved slower than it needed to.

We put the whole process into one workflow and made it visible to everyone working on it. A developer logs in and sees their own projects and what's theirs to do next. A reviewer sees only the projects and steps that belong to them, with their open items surfaced, so they can see what they need to do that day. Everything sorts by status or by funding round. The state raises hundreds of millions in bond capital and releases it round by round.

The workflow itself is configured at runtime. The state can add a step, redo one, or reorder the flow on their own, without a developer touching code.

With that many documents in play, most of which don't matter for the task in front of you, finding the right one used to be its own job. People now mark the current version of any file and pull up only the document types that matter for a given step, out of the project's full repository. Everyone works from the same files, and from the live version of them.

The heart of it is the proforma. Funding comes down to ROI and whether a project can repay its bond, and if the numbers don't work, the state can't fund it. That viability math lives in an Excel proforma, and for the people doing it, Excel is the happy place. They were never going to trade it for a web form, so we didn't ask them to.

We met them where they were. The proforma comes in as Excel at the right stage, and the key numbers get scraped off it into a database. That unlocked two things they never had. First, reporting: you can't aggregate a pile of multi-tab Excel templates, but you can report on a database, and they didn't have one before this. Second, consistency: those numbers change often, and a single change used to mean hand-editing the same figure in a dozen places across their work product. Now it lives in one place and pushes out to every template that uses it, with versioning, so the live proforma is always the one in play.

All of this runs on Conductor, our case-management accelerator and current flagship, and Michigan was the first client we ever put into production on it. The features that carry the app are the ones Conductor is built around: configurable workflows, multiple programs, funding rounds, public windows to open and close applications, even an anonymous view for posting funding decisions. Proving them on a live client is what moved Conductor from an internal tool to something we put in front of others.

My job was to understand the problem and help the Michigan team see what the solution could be. I shaped the vision for the dynamic workflows and case management with our CTO, who built it, and I was the project lead taking it to production. It's been live a few months, early enough that the headline numbers are still ahead of it, and they're happy with what they have.

I also carried the sale. I was already Michigan's day-to-day contact on everything we'd built for them, so when this new project came about, I was the one they trusted to talk to. Two colleagues worked it with me, our CTO and my VP of Sales, but I was the one on the phone giving the price they said yes to, which isn't usually my seat. It was the biggest deal I've ever personally closed.