Opening a restaurant or a hotel means juggling dozens of moving parts over several months. Concept, market analysis, architecture, interior design, sign-off from the owner, construction oversight. Each stage hooks into the next: planning has to be approved before design begins, design has to be locked before materials get ordered. Miss a single dependency and the whole timeline shifts.
YOD Group lives this reality daily. The Ukrainian architecture studio handles end-to-end projects in hospitality — restaurants, hotels, bars, spa complexes, event spaces. The team blends design, business consulting, and management, so a client walks away with more than an interior: they get a working business model for the venue, built around profitability and a fast return on investment.
To keep all of this in one field of view, the studio moved to if.team, a Ukrainian platform for managing projects, tasks, teams, and finances. Here's how YOD Group structured its work inside the platform — from Gantt-chart planning to reports that go straight into client presentations.
What needed sorting out
The studio runs several projects in parallel, each at its own stage. The core need was simple to state: see how tasks depend on one another within a project, without keeping those links in someone's head or scattered across spreadsheets.
Reporting sat right beside that. YOD Group regularly needs charts and summaries — internally, to know where a project stands, and externally, for clients who want a clear view of progress and milestones during meetings. Assembling those by hand every time meant pulling designers away from actual design work.
Hence the brief for the system: surface task dependencies, give a transparent picture of workload, and let the team prepare reports in a few clicks rather than half a day.
Planning on a Gantt chart
The studio's main planning tool is the Gantt chart. Every task ties to a specific project, carries a deadline and an owner, and the chart lays out which tasks block later stages and which are critical to the finish line.
There's flexibility in how you view it: one overview across all projects at once, a detailed task-level schedule, or a single chart for one project. Any of these exports to PDF — and that's what closed the reporting gap. A few minutes, and there's a ready document for a client or for management, with progress and milestones visible without extra commentary. The team coordinates more smoothly, misunderstandings drop off, and the process stays transparent at every level.
Statuses, deadlines, and workload
Each task's status is visible in real time: open, in progress, or done. Next to it sit the owner, the deadline, the priority, and the scope. A delay surfaces right away instead of at the end of a stage, when there's no longer room to react. Duplicated work becomes obvious too, before it quietly eats up someone's hours.
A separate view covers workload, broken down by project, task, and role. The data lands in charts and tables, so it's clear who's stretched thin and who has room to take on more. YOD Group leans on these numbers when distributing work across people and revisiting deadlines.
Teams, roles, and access
Not everyone at the studio needs to see everything. An architect working on a single restaurant shouldn't have to wade through a dozen unrelated projects — it only scatters their attention.
So access rights are set up to show each person only the projects and tasks they're responsible for. That keeps things orderly and the data protected. Teams form around specific projects: you can assign a lead, distribute roles, and define the level of access to different functions. When a new designer joins, bringing them into the relevant projects is straightforward — nothing extraneous opens up, and lines of responsibility stay clean.
Recurring processes
A lot of the studio's work repeats from project to project — the same approval stages, the same checkpoints. Setting them up by hand each time is needless friction.
The platform lets the team save templates for these tasks, send reminders, and update statuses automatically. Each recurring task links to a project or a team, so the sequence holds and nothing drops out of the chain. The system shows which stages are finished, what needs attention, and flags key dates on its own. The team, in turn, focuses on decisions and the creative side instead of manually babysitting routine steps.
Reports and analytics
Reports generate per project and per team, giving a full picture: task status, how loaded people are, overall progress. The information comes as tables, charts, and graphs, so spotting where the process stalls takes little time.
YOD Group puts this data to work twice over. Internally — to adjust plans, reallocate resources, and keep deadlines in check. Externally — in client presentations, where the reports demonstrate transparency and the results achieved.
What changed
YOD Group pulled control over every project and task into one place. Dependencies between tasks, deadlines, accountable roles — all of it reads from a single system, with no need to piece the picture together from scattered sources.
Templates and automated reminders cut the time spent on management overhead and lowered the odds of missing something important. Flexible roles, custom fields, and filters make it quick to bring new people on board and keep order across every project at once.
The studio grew as a result — in project volume and in headcount — without losing its grip on operations. Routine moved into automation, and the focus returned to what YOD Group exists for: creating architecture that works both as a space and as a business. For the studio, if.team became a platform that matures alongside it — new needs find a solution here rather than running into the limits of the tool.
More about what the platform can do, plus a link to book a demo: https://if.team/ua/.
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