RXR

RXR is the 3rd largest commercial real estate company in NY. As a modern company, RXR heavily leverages technology to advance their performance in their space. This makes RXR one of the more technology-enabled real-estate companies in the US.

RXR had a legacy internal tool that could only be run on Internet Explorer. Microsoft announced that in 2023, Internet Explorer would be phased off given the rise of Microsoft Edge. This placed RXR into a challenging citation, where they knew it was imperative to make a technology investment to upgrade their systems to comply with all modern web browsers.

As a high-impact project of significant importance to RXR, Aloa worked directly with RXR’s Senior Vice President of Digital Initiatives to work through the design and implementation of an overhauled system. Given Internet Explorer’s phase-out timeline, RXR was on a timeframe. They had to have their new system up and running before Internet Explorer was officially obsolete.

While they have an internal engineering team, RXR didn’t want to use their team’s bandwidth to build this tool, so they approached Aloa to help them get to the finish line and avoid any hiccups in their business operations.

The software that RXR needed to build was fairly straightforward, but some of the use cases in their flow were highly specific. We needed to ensure that the development team chosen really understood the business requirements and how it impacted the business performance, ensuring that the solution was accurate and scalable.

Given RXR is a sizable entity with over 500 employees, there were many stakeholders that needed to be advised in this process. This meant that we needed to build in multiple layers of feedback loops and sign-offs to ensure that we adhered to the expectations of all stakeholders. This ultimately led to us building a roadmap that planned for a longer user testing period to account for the numerous layers of communication.

With RXR having a previous experience in outsourcing that wasn’t positive, it was important that we identified a team within RXR’s time-zone to ensure there was more aligned communication.

Aloa was able to identify a Partner Firm in Colombia, Joonik. Joonik has deep experience in working with enterprise clients and navigating multiple stakeholders. We started off with a discovery and design phase to finalize the requirements. Joonik too the user stories that RXR provided and initially mocked up a full-blown prototype of the new platform – it is called TaskBank.

After being reviewed by all stakeholders, we went through several iterations before receiving approval from all relevant individuals. This phase took about 2 months.

We then began a 3-month development phase to build the product. Once delivered, it required several months to finish user testing, gather all necessary feedback, and implement the finalized iterations.

Aloa and Joonik were able to deliver the project on-time and within budget. This has allowed RXR to continue business operations without a hiccup as they are no longer dependent on Internet Explorer.

The new tool is more modern and responsive than the previous tool. It also includes new features that the old platform didn’t have, making it not only more modern but also a more efficient tool than their previous legacy system.