Design Operations
Workflow Design
Project Management
Systems Thinking
Stakeholder Alignment
Onboarding
Information Architecture

Design Director
2015 – present
In-house
Bonhams

CASE STUDY
Operational Backbone: Designing a Project Management System Across 800+ Projects a Year

Designed and implemented a project management system and asset archive, creating real-time visibility, consistent production standards, and institutional memory for 800+ projects a year.

SUMMARY
An auction house produces 800+ unique projects annually across two major sale seasons. How should those projects be tracked and documented from intake to archive? I designed and built a project management system and asset archive from the ground up, creating real-time visibility, consistent production standards, and institutional memory.

THE CHALLENGE

The question was simple to ask and hard to solve: how should 800+ unique projects a year be tracked and documented from intake to archive?

The existing system (a weekly Excel sheet) couldn't answer it:

Submissions were inconsistent. Even with defined fields, submissions were inconsistent. Critical information like asset size, due dates, and delivery contacts was routinely left blank
Projects had no dynamic status. Without dynamic status updates, projects get lost, sidetracked or never started
The system ran on institutional memory. The entire system depended on one person’s institutional knowledge and “same as last time, just change the image” was a common brief

WHAT I BUILT
A project management pipeline. I restructured and built a system tailored to the specific needs of an auction house design team. Card templates define exactly what information a project requires and are labeled for easy tracking and filtering. Once a template is complete, it moves through a defined pipeline — Pending → Ready → Design → Review → Done — with physical files moving into the archive in parallel.

An archive with a real taxonomy. I created the folder structure and file naming conventions for both active projects and the archive, solving directly for the most common brief: "like the last one, but with a few changes." The system is organized across four levels — Year, Asset Type, Subtype, and workflow state — with every project folder labeled by a consistent naming convention (Category-Department-Shortname-MMDDYY) for automatic sorting. Each folder contains two subfolders: 1-Working, which holds everything, and 2-Final, which holds packaged, production-ready files.

A linked reference system. The archive currently holds roughly 2,000–3,000 individual projects across three active years. Each Trello card links directly to its archive location and includes a low-res proof, which doubles as both a quick visual reference and a record of the naming convention for locating the original source files.

THE IMPACT

7 active users move 40–50 projects a month through a shared, real-time system with full visibility into each project's lifecycle.
Extended to Events, a separate board built on the same structure to handle higher project density and compressed, overlapping timelines.
Adopted by Marketing and Press, using the same structure as a shared visual touchpoint for their own team.
Onboarding no longer depends on one person. New team members get real-time access to current work and full visibility into project history.
Source files are locatable by search, not memory, thanks to the naming convention.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

A tool is only as good as what it forces people to do. The Excel sheet failed because it had no mechanism to require complete information. Structuring the system around templates and defined pipeline stages made consistency the default, not an ask.

Institutional memory is a single point of failure. Building a system that documented why and how, not just what, turned one person's knowledge into something the whole team could rely on.

Good infrastructure gets reused. The system was built for one design team, but its structure proved durable enough to extend to Events and adapt for Marketing and Press — a sign the underlying logic, not just the tool, was sound.

Mei Levenson

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