Project Management System for a commercial interior design company

Dos por Dos: Grupo Imagen

Is a company based in Telde, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. They specialize in designing and creating interiors for commercial spaces, particularly focusing on luxury and perfume brands. They offer a complete service, working with clients from the initial concept and design, all the way through to the production and implementation in the commercial space. The company has over 37 years of experience and a team of more than 60 professionals across 4 Canary Islands, Balearic islands and mainland Spain, including architects, interior designers, and experts in production and installation.

The Problem

The dispersion of employees caused miscommunication, disorganization, and data loss.

Main challenges included:

• No clear view of the status of each project
• Projects and tasks getting lost or forgotten
• Overdue projects and lost clients
• Poor customer experience
• Overcomplicated flow of information
• Enormous amount of daily emails
• Low productivity due to lack of order
• Data scattered across multiple different tools
• Disconnection between departments
• Information overload
• Repetitive manual tasks

The Initial Workflow

The Notion Implementation Process

Desired effects

• Better project management and communication
• Centralized workspace
• Reduction of costs and the number of softwares used
• Transparency between departments
• Software integrations
• Automation of repetitive tasks
• Highly optimized databases

Implementation process

Implemented Notion Workspace

Due to a high degree of flexibility, intuitiveness, and access to API , Notion was chosen as a project management software for the company.

MASTER DATABASES

Notion workspace built for Dos por Dos is composed of 3 relational master databases: projects, related tasks, and related files, created in a general company teamspace.

LINKED DATABASE VIEWS

Linked database views were created across different teamspaces to make sure that everyone in the company has access to the same information, yet the most relevant and most specific to oneself. This approach also ensures no data duplicates resulting in faster loading speed of databases. Each database view load was limited to 10-25 pages at once to ensure smooth loading, despite the huge number of pages and data. What’s more, color-coding was used for all departments to quickly visually differentiate the content of each.

CRM INTEGRATION & EXTERNAL AUTOMATIONS

Together with the client, we’ve decided to connect Notion to the CRM software (Zoho CRM, also implemented by me from scratch) used by the company, utilizing automations and workflows with a third-party app (Zoho Flow). Each approved deal recorded in the CRM, and each change to the record results in creating a new page and updating it in the projects database in Notion. When each deal is created in the CRM, the departments corresponding to a project are selected. Almost immediately, a workflow created in Zoho Flow fetches the data of the new deal and sends it to the main project database, with a property “departments”, and sends back to CRM the ID of newly created item. Later, the linked views only display this new project in the relevant departmental teamspaces.

TASK & SUBTASK AUTOMATION

Additionally, each department has to select the type of project in their case. After that, Notion database automation generates a relevant set of tasks for each of these departments, and subtasks for the next departments, which take over the project on the next stages.

CUSTOM FORMULAS

Due to the requirements gathered from the client, some custom formula properties were added to display data which is not available in Notion by default, which included for example:

ROLLUP PROPERTIES

Rollup properties were used to not manually duplicate the data between databases and have a clear view of the most relevant information always at hand. These included for example:

SETTINGS & SHARING PERMISSIONS

Everyone in the company has access to the main teamspace in which the master databases were created, with locked pages and databases. Apart from that, each department has access either to their whole separate teamspace, or only to “my tasks” in case of some departments (as per client’s request) with the linked views of master databases. The teamspaces with limited access to some of the users have a separate space shared with managers (teamspace owners), where they have insight to basic analytics regarding the performance of their department.

Additional Features

After successful implementation and onboarding, the project has been continued and new features were added.

• For the IT department, the project management with time management system was created to calculate the time it takes to complete each task and each project.

• For the CEO, a personal workspace was created for private projects and documents, connected to the workspace of other managers, allowing for easy data transfer, when the information is ready to be shared.

• What’s more, for each department separately, and for the whole company in general the dashboards with charts were created.

Advanced Features Used

The project utilized Notion's most advanced features.

• Rollups
• Templates
• Notion API
• Advanced formulas
• Recurring templates
• Relational databases
• Self-referential filters
• Database automations

Results Achieved for the Client

45+

Hours per month saved thanks to automations

4x

Faster response to client’s inquiries regarding their active projects

73%

Cost reduction on project management and organization tools

93%

Average employee satisfaction in terms of PM and overall organization

43%

Less team emails sent in the first week of implementation

Other benefits included a better insight into product journey, higher productivity of the employees and higher satisfaction, full connection of all departments within the company, basic data analytics for the directors of the company and for the managers of the departments, and many more.

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