One tool for consultancy: project planning, tasks and client collaboration
Plan client projects, manage tasks, track time and collaborate with clients in Starbrix Core. A practical guide for consultancies, from setup to delivery.
A consultancy project can look well organized until someone asks a simple question: “Are we still on track?” The schedule is in a spreadsheet, delivery tasks are in another tool, and the latest client feedback is somewhere in an email thread. Answering means piecing the project together again.
Starbrix Core brings project plans, tasks, time tracking, files and communication into a shared environment. Your team can schedule an engagement in Gantt, manage daily work in Kanban and review progress across client projects without maintaining separate task lists.
This guide shows how to organize a client engagement in Starbrix Core, keep delivery work and client feedback connected, and turn a successful project structure into a reusable template.
A shared workflow for client delivery
Consulting work needs a clear connection between the agreed plan, the team's daily tasks and the client's decisions. Starbrix Core brings these together through synchronized Gantt, Table, Kanban and Calendar views, with time tracking, files, messaging and permissions alongside the work.
For example, your project manager can review the engagement in Gantt while consultants update their tasks in Kanban. Both are working with the same information. Personal views help each consultant follow assignments across clients, while the organization-wide overview helps managers review all engagements.
Core is fully optimized for smartphones too, so consultants can manage tasks and follow project work while visiting clients or traveling.
1. Establish an overview of your client projects
You do not need to create a workspace to see your project portfolio. Starbrix Core provides an organization-wide overview of projects by default, with search, sorting, categorization and filtering.
Use a consistent naming convention, such as:
- Northfield Ltd – Operating Model Review
- Westhaven Group – Strategy Workshop
- Lakeside Partners – Implementation Support
For a small consultancy, that overview may be enough. As the business grows, optional Workspaces let you group projects and tasks for a practice area, delivery team or selected portfolio. For example, an “Implementation Team” workspace can bring together relevant work from several client engagements.
A useful first decision: agree on the minimum information every client project must contain. A project owner, planned start and finish dates, current status and next deliverable provide a manageable starting point.
2. Build one client project around your delivery process
Choose a real engagement and create a project for it. Keep the structure close to the way your team delivers work and the way your client understands the engagement.
For an operating model review, the main phases might be:
- Scope and kickoff
- Discovery
- Analysis and recommendations
- Client review
- Final delivery and handover
Add the activities needed within each phase. Discovery, for example, could include stakeholder interviews, data collection, an initial findings workshop and a discovery summary.
Assign responsibility clearly. A task such as “Collect client data” is more useful when it identifies who will request the data, when it is needed and what happens next.
Avoid filling the plan with detail that nobody will maintain. Break down near-term work into actionable tasks, and refine later phases as the engagement develops.
Check before moving on: can a colleague identify the project owner, the current phase and the next client deliverable without asking you?
3. Schedule delivery and client review in Gantt
Use the Gantt view to turn the delivery structure into a schedule. Set planned start and finish dates and connect activities with dependencies where their timing is linked.
A simple sequence might be:
Stakeholder interviews → Findings workshop → Draft recommendations → Client review → Final report
Include client review as scheduled work. A draft due on Friday is not the same as an approved deliverable due on Friday. Make the review period, responsible contact and expected decision date visible.
Set planned start and finish dates on the project itself as well. Both dates are needed for its time bar to display correctly.
Core supports finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish and start-to-finish dependencies, including lead and lag. Use the dependency type that reflects the work; a straightforward finish-to-start sequence is often enough for a consulting engagement.
Once the agreed schedule is ready, save the project's baseline. Core supports one baseline per project, allowing you to compare the current schedule with the saved plan.
4. Manage daily work in Kanban, Table and Calendar
Different situations call for different views of the same work:
These views stay synchronized because they use the same project and task data. For example, moving a card to Completed in Kanban updates the same task's status in Table. Use Gantt to manage its schedule and dependencies.
Use a small set of statuses that your team understands. The default statuses are Not Started, In Progress and Completed. You can customize statuses by project type, for example by adding Awaiting Client Review.
Make tasks specific enough to show meaningful progress. “Prepare report” might become “Draft recommendations,” “Review draft internally” and “Send draft to client.”
Keep status and State distinct. Status describes the workflow stage. The happy, neutral and sad indicators in the State field express a subjective assessment of how the project or task is going. A task can be in progress while its State signals a concern that needs attention.
Team members can also use their personal task, Kanban and Calendar views to follow their work across projects.
5. Set up access for client collaboration
Before inviting client contacts or suppliers, decide what they need to do. Will they follow progress, contribute to tasks, review deliverables or take part in project discussions?
Use member and project permissions to configure access for those responsibilities. Review the settings before sharing project information, particularly when your organization manages several clients.
Keep the access model straightforward. A client contact should be able to find the relevant plan, actions and deliverables easily. Internal colleagues should have the access needed to maintain the project.
Check before inviting participants: review the member and project permissions so that each person has the access needed for their role.
6. Keep deliverables, discussions and decisions with the work
Attach files or add links to the relevant project or task. A draft report belongs with its review task; meeting notes belong with the activity or project they support.
If you keep working documents in OneDrive, Google Drive or SharePoint, add links in Starbrix so the team can find them from the project. Access to the linked files remains subject to the permissions in the external service.
Projects and tasks can contain unlimited file attachments and links. Organize them around the work they support: the discovery summary on the discovery task, the draft recommendations on the review task, and general reference material on the project.
Use project and task messaging to keep discussions close to the work. Core also supports organization and workspace chats, group messages and direct messages, with email notifications when users are offline.
Track client approval as an explicit task
For an important deliverable, create a task such as Client Approval – Discovery Summary. Attach or link the document, identify the responsible person and schedule the review period.
Record when the deliverable was sent, what feedback is outstanding and the final decision. Connect subsequent work with dependencies where appropriate.
Agree with your team how approval decisions are recorded and when work may proceed. Keep the review task open until the decision has been recorded, so outstanding client feedback stays visible during project reviews.
7. Track hours and review progress across engagements
Record time against the relevant work so delivery progress and effort can be reviewed together. Core supports hour entry, timestamps, a timer and a weekly reporting grid.
Where review is needed, time approval can use one to three stages. The top-row checkbox allows reviewers to approve or unapprove all entries in the current view.
For a consultancy, a regular review should answer:
- What has been completed since the last review?
- Which deliverables or client decisions are due next?
- Where is reported effort growing beyond expectations?
- Which project needs management attention?
Use project summaries and portfolio dashboards to support these discussions. Organization-wide portfolio visibility is available without creating a separate workspace, and Core's free plan includes project summaries and portfolio dashboards.
Run project reviews directly in Starbrix. If important information still exists only in a spreadsheet, move it into the shared workflow and address the reason it was missing. Agree on one authoritative place for project status so the team does not have to maintain duplicate reports.
8. Turn a proven project structure into a template
Once the structure works for a real engagement, create a reusable project template. Remove client-specific information and retain the phases, tasks and supporting material that will help the next project.
Core supports global, workspace and customer templates. You can copy a template with or without its schedule and resources, and anchor the schedule to a start or finish date while preserving task durations. Links and files are copied too, so review template content before reusing it for another client.
Test the template by creating a sample project. Check the structure, assignments, dates, dependencies and copied materials before making it your standard starting point.
Keep improving the template based on delivery experience. If the team repeatedly adds the same review task, include it. If a section is routinely ignored, simplify it or clarify its purpose.
Common questions
Do I need a workspace for each client?
No. Core provides an organization-wide project overview by default. Use workspaces when grouping selected projects or tasks improves coordination. Configure client access through the relevant member and project permissions.
Do I need separate task lists for Gantt and Kanban?
No. Core's Gantt, Table, Kanban and Calendar views use the same underlying data. If the views appear different, check that you are viewing the same project and that filters are not hiding relevant tasks.
Can I manage client approvals in Core?
Yes. Create a review task, attach or link the deliverable, set a due date and record the decision with the work. This is a task-based review process; time-report approvals are a separate feature with one to three approval stages.
Can consultants use Core on a smartphone?
Yes. Core is fully optimized for mobile use, including smartphones, so consultants can manage tasks and follow project work while away from their desks.
Can I start with a small team?
Yes. Starbrix Core is free for organizations with up to three members. Include the people who will need accounts when assessing your membership requirements.
Start with one real client engagement
Choose an upcoming project, define its delivery phases and schedule both the work and the client review periods. Assign responsibilities, add the relevant files and links, and use the shared views for your next project meeting.
When that process works, turn it into a template and apply it to the next engagement. You will have a repeatable way to manage client delivery, with plans, tasks, time and decisions connected to the work.
Start with Starbrix Core's free plan for up to three members and build your first client project.
