Status: Delivered. Described from our own delivery records. Client identity, brand and commercial terms are withheld. Figures, where given, cover the period stated and nothing beyond it.
Context
An organisation running multiple concurrent projects, where the current state of any one of them was distributed across a knowledge base, a set of tools, and whatever was said in the last meeting.
The problem
- Answering “where is this” required asking several people and reconciling their answers.
- Meetings were being held largely to transfer status, which is an expensive way to move information.
- Decisions made in conversation were not reliably captured anywhere.
- Written updates were inconsistent, because writing them competed with doing the work.
What we built
An assistant grounded in the organisation's knowledge base
So answers cite what is actually recorded.
Automatic meeting attendance
With capture and transcription, so what is said in a meeting becomes part of the record rather than evaporating.
Daily and weekly progress summaries
Produced from that record rather than requested from people.
Direct question answering
On progress, blockers and next steps.
How we delivered it
- 1
Establish what the record is
Which sources count as authoritative, and what an answer should be grounded in.
- 2
Build retrieval over the knowledge base
With citation back to source.
- 3
Add meeting capture
With explicit consent handling and clear indication that the assistant is present.
- 4
Add summarisation
Reviewed against what a good project manager would have written for the same period.
- 5
Pilot on a small number of projects
Before extending.
How it was phased
Indicative phasing for work of this shape. Actual duration varies with data quality, access and decision speed.
What the client keeps
- The assistant and its source
- Retrieval and grounding configuration
- The consent and notification policy as implemented
- The summary history