The problem
Creative requests arrived four ways: email, Teams, WhatsApp, and someone walking over. None had an owner, a status or a record. A request could be sent correctly and received by nobody. Two people did their jobs, and the work still never existed.
One front door
The fix wasn't to ban channels. People still message. What changed is where a request lands: every request now becomes one record, with one owner and one status, visible to everyone who needs it.
The architecture
Built inside Microsoft 365, not beside it. A standalone app would have been a better product and a worse system, because it would have given everyone a reason to keep using WhatsApp. The hard part was deciding which layer owns which responsibility.
The engine
Five states, each with an owner. Every change notifies exactly the roles that need to act, so nobody chases. And only the requester can mark work complete.
Three views, one record
Requesters see status. Designers see the brief and files. The creative manager sees volume and load across the team. Three permissions on the same record, not three systems.
Judgment calls
What the system decides is less interesting than what I decided for it:
- Completion is an agreement, not a claim. Only the requester closes a request.
- The form encodes the brief. Each required field prevents a specific downstream failure.
- Files live with the request, not on laptops. Work survives leave and handover.
- I refused to solve a data problem with an interface. The record came first; the views came last.
Outcome
[One or two lines with real figures: requests routed since launch, turnaround before and after, adoption rate. If there are no numbers, say what changed: "Every request since [month/year] has an owner, a status and a record."]
What it doesn't prove
It shows a governance layer can be built from tools an organisation already pays for, by one person, without a developer. It doesn't show it scales past one market, or that it survives without someone who understands why each rule exists. That's the next problem.