Industry: Interior Design, Architecture
Service: Project Management Automation, Zoho Implementation
Tools: Zoho Projects, Zoho People, Zoho Analytics, Zoho WorkDrive
Situation
An interior design studio with an annual revenue in the range of Rs 3 to 4 crore was managing 15 or more projects simultaneously. The business had grown steadily on the strength of its design quality and client relationships, but the operational infrastructure had not kept pace.
Project coordination happened across WhatsApp groups, email threads, and shared drives with no consistent structure. Design artefacts, drawings, and documents were spread across local folders, individual laptops, and informal file shares. There was no system for tracking which team member was working on what, how many hours were being spent per project, or what a project was actually costing relative to what had been quoted.
Problem Statement
For a project-based business, the inability to track effort and cost at the project level is a structural risk. The studio was delivering good work, but had limited visibility into which projects were profitable, which team members were overloaded, and whether quoted fees were aligned with actual delivery costs.
Specific gaps:
- No project-level effort tracking; team utilisation was invisible
- Design artefacts and project documents had no central organised repository
- Costing was done at quote stage and never reconciled against actual effort
- Project status updates required the principal to actively chase team members
- Analytics and reporting on project performance did not exist
What We Did
We structured the implementation around four connected Zoho modules, each solving a distinct operational problem.
- Zoho Projects was configured as the central project workspace. Every active project was set up with defined phases, tasks, milestones, and assigned owners. Task dependencies were mapped to reflect how interior design projects actually flow, from concept and design development through to execution and handover. Clients could be updated through controlled project views without accessing internal data.
- Zoho People was configured for time tracking at the task and project level. Team members logged hours against specific tasks, giving the studio its first accurate view of effort by project, by team member, and by phase.
- Zoho WorkDrive replaced the scattered file storage. A structured folder hierarchy was created by project, with defined locations for drawings, mood boards, client approvals, vendor documents, and correspondence. Versioning and access controls were configured so the right people had access to the right files.
- Zoho Analytics pulled data from Projects and People to give leadership a live view of project progress, team utilisation, and hours logged versus hours budgeted per project. This gave the principal the ability to see project health across the entire portfolio without manual status chasing.
Outcome
- First-time visibility into actual effort and cost at the project level
- Team utilisation visible across all active projects, enabling better workload distribution
- Design artefacts and project documents organised in a single structured repository
- Project status available on demand without manual follow-up
- Basis for data-informed fee benchmarking on future projects
Design businesses often grow to meaningful revenue on the strength of craft alone. But at the point where multiple projects run in parallel, the absence of operational structure becomes a growth constraint. Knowing where time is going and what a project actually costs is not administrative overhead. It is the foundation for building a sustainable and scalable practice.