The Importance (to us) of Project Tracking

Every business will have a different limiting constraint at any point in time. For a software consulting company it could be things like their capacity to sell projects, spec them, build them or test them. For us, where we often have 20-30 projects live at any given time, the limiting factor is project tracking . . .

For most consulting businesses with a relatively small number of relatively large projects, project tracking (being able to easily see and manage the status of projects) is important, but it isn't usually critical. However, because we handle a large number of projects, we probably spend almost as much time in switching costs (getting up to speed with projects each time we need to touch them) as we do in actually servicing them (the unintended consequence of the servicing being so efficient). I also find that often a project where we're waiting for input from a busy client can fall between the cracks for a while, and we seldom have a really good sense of exactly where we are at with all outstanding projects at any point in time. It's also been known for us to not invoice a project on completion and we have no really good metrics of things like our lead times from quote to spec, spec to build, build to deploy and other interesting metrics from a lean perspective.

One of the things I'm thinking about right now is a system which is somewhat flexible (to support different project types), but that allows us to easily describe and implement automated workflows for projects so we can do things like track the amount of time clients were waiting for us and the amount of time we were waiting from them, so that we can automatically have reminder emails sent out to contacts (us, partners and clients) if they have outstanding tasks, and so we can automatically go through check lists when comps are delivered or when a site is about to be launched to make sure we don't forget to do any of the things (like purchasing and setting up secure certificates) that could slow down projects. I'm also thinking of adding automated invoicing to the system and the ability to see financial reporting such as amounts invoices, projects won/lost, etc to give a better ability to track the leading financial indicators and to more accurately set targets to help us to achieve future financial goals without having to spend time building such reports by hand.

Of course, I'd also want such a system to act as a central repository for client communications, client sign offs, project assets (comps, graphics, etc) and the like to provide a "one stop shop" for all information related to client projects (and aggregate reporting on a partner level).

Anyone else been played with building a system like this? Any thoughts/experiences? Would you like a system like this? What would YOU like in a system designed to improve the efficiency of building web apps? Any input appreciated!