Custom Project Management System for a Professional Services Firm

The Challenge

A professional services company with a team of around 15 people came to us with a problem that is more common than most businesses admit: their project management lived across four different places simultaneously. New project briefs came in over email. Task assignments happened over WhatsApp. Progress updates were given in weekly meetings. And the actual status of every live project was tracked in a shared Excel sheet that about six people had edit access to.

The Excel tracker had grown organically over two years into something quite complex — colour-coded by status, with multiple tabs, conditional formatting, and formulas that nobody fully understood anymore. When someone updated a cell incorrectly, it sometimes broke formulas elsewhere. When two people edited simultaneously, the version that saved last won, and occasionally an update from one person would quietly overwrite another's.

Leadership had no reliable way to see the actual current status of all live projects without scheduling a call with each project lead. Client-facing staff had no easy way to check what had been committed to a client without digging through email threads. And new team members took several weeks to get comfortable with the unofficial system of which WhatsApp group to use for which type of update.

Our Solution

We began with two weeks of workflow mapping — sitting with the team leads, the delivery staff, and the directors separately to understand how work actually moved through the organisation rather than how it was supposed to on paper. The gap between the two was significant, and designing around the real workflow rather than the intended one was what made the tool actually get adopted.

The platform we built has three main views. A project board showing all live projects, their current stage, assigned lead, deadline, and RAG (red/amber/green) status at a glance. A task view within each project showing individual tasks, assigned team members, due dates, and completion status. And a client view showing a simplified timeline of what has been delivered and what is next — accessible to the client team without needing to log in.

Role-based access means different team members see different things. Directors see everything across all projects. Project leads see their own projects in full detail plus a summary view of others. Delivery team members see only the tasks assigned to them plus the overall project context. This reduced information overload significantly — people stopped needing to filter out irrelevant updates.

Notifications were a deliberate decision. We built in email notifications only for task assignments and approaching deadlines — not for every comment or status change, which is what most off-the-shelf tools default to and what causes teams to start ignoring all notifications equally. The signal-to-noise ratio was something the team specifically asked us to think carefully about.

We also added a simple time logging feature — not a time-tracking tool in the surveillance sense, but a way for project leads to log approximate hours against each project phase, which fed into a basic profitability view for each project that the directors found immediately useful.

Results

Technology Used