About the Client
The Prime Company is a construction and property management firm specializing in school housing for universities across the United States.
Brief
We worked with their COO to stand up a Notion workspace while training him to be the Notion Champion of the company. The workflow was modeled and expanded after an existing Trello use that had been outgrown. Afterward, the company expanded its use of Notion to its Design and Accounting departments.
Services Provided
☑️ Workspace Development: Independent (without client)
☑️ Workspace Development: Collaborative (with client)
☑️ Notion Training
The Client’s Problem
The client, as COO, had set up Trello boards for multiple property managers and was pushing it past its limits. They were silo’d and also relied on an automated bot to refresh tasks every week by marking all of them incomplete. This meant there was no possibility of tracking data over time, at least in Trello. This was important because property managers received bonuses based on their task list for a week and this data was kept in a separate google sheet using formulas to calculate bonuses. He had a process that had outgrown his system because his system was limited by his software.
Our Solution
Trevor and Josh met over video calls for a total of around 30 hours of billed work, some of that including independent work. Josh worked with him to first understand the basics of Notion and then started working through mirroring his process from trello in Notion while looking for opportunities to improve or scale as Josh could see into the future of the system and any potential hiccups or possibilities might come out of a certain setup. We used master databases for locations, vendors, people, projects, tasks, etc. and used dashboards for hierarchies of administration and managers.
Key to successfully mirroring Trevor’s process from Trello was coming up with a task management system that was recurring but did not rely on simply changing the dates of a task to the next date. We wanted a system that could hold and track data over time. With multiple property managers and tasks for each day of the week, this meant the weekly task creation count was nearly 1000 tasks. I created a system where this was managed inside the template of a “weeks” database. A database holding all of the new tasks to be created each week was actually housed inside the template and then linked databased to it were also created inside the template. The process for making new tasks each week was divided into three steps upon creating a new week. First, the newly created tasks would be assigned an actual date property according to their “day of the week” select property. This was streamlined using filtered views of the template database for each day. The user simply grabs each day and drops it into a linked database (of the same database) in calendar view on the day of the week it belongs to. The next step is to transfer tasks, now with real date properties, into the actual tasks database. The tasks also include some other properties that transfer like “morning” and “evening” tasks. Finally, the third step is checking an unfiltered view of the template database to make sure it is empty, confirming that all tasks have been transferred over. All in all, the process of creating new weekly tasks takes less than five minutes and the user is now able to track tasks across multiple people and properties for each week. There is now a reliable history of data that allows for accurate bonus calculations and performance metrics.