Operations Audit and Central Dashboard for a Creative Studio
Mapped how work really moved, then built one dashboard holding SOPs, approvals, assets, and every department's database.
PROBLEM
Everything the studio knew lived somewhere different. Onboarding materials sat in one drive, brand assets in another, project context in chat threads, and approval rules mostly in people's heads. New starters spent their first weeks asking colleagues where things were, and those colleagues spent their weeks answering. Nobody could say with confidence who signed off on what, which meant work either stalled waiting for permission nobody needed or shipped without the review it did need.
APPROACH
The audit came first. We traced how work actually moved through the studio, including the workarounds people had built up over the years and stopped mentioning because they'd become normal. That map became the specification for a single company dashboard, built to hold everything in one navigable place:
Onboarding materials and SOPs
Team hierarchy and a clear approval matrix
Brand assets and project context
The project management board
A page per department, each linking through to its own database, including the client database and access-restricted finance sheets
Access levels were designed from the start, so the finance and client data stayed properly restricted while everything else stayed open.
RESULT
New starters reached independent working in about half the previous time, because the questions they used to ask now had a documented answer.
Approval delays dropped noticeably once the matrix made it obvious who signed off on what, cutting an average of two days from project cycles.
Duplicate brand asset versions were consolidated from several scattered folders into one maintained library. The dashboard became the studio's default starting point rather than an intranet nobody opened, which is the outcome most internal wikis fail to reach.
