Projects & cases
TodayYou only know where the project stands after reading through the emails.
A project is rarely one thing. It is appointments, documents, agreements, contributions and an invoice at the end. When those parts live in different places, someone regularly reconstructs the status from emails. We bring them together.
Where it usually gets stuck
- The current status of a project lives in an email thread.
- Tasks are handed out verbally and then forgotten.
- Nobody can see at a glance what is open and with whom.
- During holidays or illness the overview is missing.
A case only becomes a case once it has a place. As long as appointments sit in the calendar, tasks in someone's head, documents in a folder and agreements in a mailbox, the current state is a reconstruction – made afresh every time and dependent on whoever happens to be in.
Day to day this barely shows, because it works as long as everyone is there. It shows when someone is off, or when a customer asks about something from six months ago.
What that looks like in the workflow
01 Create
Number, status, ownership
From here everything hangs in one place instead of spreading out.
02 Tasks
What always runs the same is already there
Prepared steps with a deadline and an owner, instead of thinking it through each time.
03 People involved
Who belongs to it
Internal and external, with their role – also for the distribution list on the next letter.
04 Status
Read off instead of asked for
Open points, deadlines and the last steps at a glance.
05 Closing
Filed in order
Findable, in case someone asks in three years.
What gets built
- A case file with number, status, people involved and deadline
- Task templates for the steps that are the same in every project
- An overview of open items, filtered by person, deadline or customer
- Times and work recorded where they happen
What changes
- The state of a case can be looked up instead of reconstructed from emails.
- Open points have an owner and a deadline.
- A handover is possible without anyone having to narrate it.
- What was decided stays findable.
From applications we have built
What follows are excerpts from applications we have actually built. No mocked-up interfaces and no invented figures.
Questions about Projects & cases
We use Planner and Excel. Is that not enough?
Sometimes it is. When the overview is missing, the cause is usually not the tool but that project, tasks and documents are not connected.
Does every employee have to work with it?
Those who enter or look things up. We keep the number of mandatory fields small — otherwise nothing gets maintained.
Can we start with one type of project?
Yes, that is the usual route. One workflow properly, then the next.
Also searched asproject management · job management · cases · tasks · kanban · time tracking · project status