Customer Stories/ SYDRC
SYDRC
SYDRC Saves 20+ Hours a Week: IT Visionists Streamlines Operations for Youth Development
Case Summary
Before engaging with IT Visionists, SYDRC, a youth development organization, relied heavily on manual processes for project management and CRM functions. Their setup—Excel for project management and Views for CRM—was time-consuming and inefficient. From managing student registrations to handling sessions, their processes were disjointed, leading to reduced visibility, poor collaboration, and no actionable insights from data.
IT Visionists implemented Monday.com as a centralized hub for both CRM and project management, saving the organization more than 20 hours a week by automating their workflow.
The Story of
SYDRC!
The Somali Youth Development Resource Centre (SYDRC) was founded in response to alarmingly low GCSE pass rates among Somali students in Camden, just 3.1% in 1999. SYDRC’s efforts through mentorship and supplementary education have since increased the pass rate to 64% for girls and 59% for boys, with one student even achieving 10 A*s and pursuing medicine at Kings College.
The Challenge
SYDRC faced several operational hurdles:
Disconnected tools (Excel and Views CRM) leading to manual data transfer
Inefficient project management and student progress tracking
Limited reporting and analytics capabilities
Scaling difficulties with increasing student numbers
Lack of accountability and visibility in team performance
The main challenge in SYDRC’s operations was the way information was being handled, and the unproductive usage of their stack of tools. Collaboration on tasks took most of their time. They primarily relied on Excel, Google Forms and Views. These two tools were completely disconnected from each other, and every time information had to travel between them, it had to be done by hand, making them more prone to errors, missing important elements, and spending more time than necessary on repetitive tasks. At the same time, the crm tool didn’t had all the power to provide better reporting and analytics specially comparisons of a student’s progress from start to end.
The business was scaling with more students joining and more data and projects to manage. The existing stack of solutions was already not fulfilling the desired outcomes and projects were falling behind. The lack of interconnected processes ensured that -when the new students are registered, – efficiency, productivity, and efficient control would plummet.
In addition, due to disconnected processes, accountability wasn’t possible for the work delivered by the team.
The company had no way to visualize each project’s evolution, student and team performance, ROIs per project and globally, overall efficiency, and more.
Without these elements, the decision-making process was entirely tainted.
The Solution
SYDRC realized that they needed someone who can set them up Monday.com as a crm software that is better than Views and also set up Monday.com as their project management tool efficiently. This is where IT Visionists jumped in!
After our team of experts understood SYDRC’s main pain points and issues through an initial discovery phase, we implemented a comprehensive action plan that could compare to an extreme makeover to all the existing processes.
Workflows: Having all the key interacting stakeholders in mind, we designed and defined new workflows for every need. This brought more visibility and aided the company in sharpening its business strategy.
Monday.com Implementation for Project Management: It was defined that Monday.com would act as the center node of all their new processes and workflows. Every new workflow was designed having Monday.com in mind, to ensure maximum compatibility.
Monday.com was set up to manage all the 11 different types of projects managed by SYDRC each having a category of its own. Each workflow implemented was handling the specific objectives with possible outcomes. Task management became easier for business operations. Grant management process was structured for efficient and clear organizational outcomes.
Monday.com Implementation as CRM: As Views wasn’t capable enough to accumulate all the business needs of SYDRC, especially the complex reporting, we made a switch of CRM to Monday.com.
Monday.com for Questionnaires/Surveys.
The challenging part was to track the progress of each registered student based on the various surveys conducted and student’s progress marked at various stages. With a thoughtful analysis and strategy, we achieved it in a way which was quite simple to understand and work for the team.
We set up Monday.com to include setting up Contacts (all types), Work & Activities along with Student Registrations. Each of these were further broken down into various categories and then a detailed level further. Google Forms were replaced with WorkForms in
JotForms for Attendance: We utilized JotForm to record attendance of students in various sessions. As the number of students varied based on sessions they had registered, it was important to pull up relevant data per session as an Attendance Sheet/form and mark the attendance which should get updated in Monday.com. This was challenging and achieved using Make.com to handle complex automation.
Automation: We developed and provided a strategy to catalogue and break down different tasks into different categories. This allowed us to implement multiple process automation for each one of them from auto-assigning new tasks based on user roles, auto creating boards using pre-defined templates and to launching follow-ups when required.
Integration using Make.com (Integromat): Our automation experts utilized Make.com to deploy automation between Monday.com and JotForm’s connecting both within the same processes and workflows.
Dashboards/Reporting: Once all the flows of information were automated and connected, our experts created custom dashboards in Monday.com to provide reports that fit the business flow and helped in better analytics.
Training: To reach the desired outcome, our experts trained and coached the company’s resources so everyone could understand the importance of this strategy as well as how it works, and what is required from them to make it work.
Support: From IT Visionists, we have continued providing post-implementation support to SYDRC to further increase efficiency where possible, or to accommodate any new business dynamics within our approach.
The Results
After the strategic plan was entirely executed, the results speak for themselves:
- After the strategic plan was entirely executed, the results speak for themselves:
- Over 20 hours saved each week, thanks to automation.
- Centralized platform for all data, with real-time visibility.
- Manual work significantly reduced.
- Improved productivity and decision-making with advanced analytics.
- Seamless project management and CRM implementation and integration.
- SYDRC is now a more efficient, scalable, and data-driven organization.
- The team now concentrates on getting the tasks done without needing to worry about any slippages.
- The old Excel Sheets and Google Forms have been fully eradicated.
- Streamlined processes have made SYDRC a healthy and profitable organization.
Want to save time and be more productive? Or Tired of old processes that just don’t work anymore?
If you want to push efficiency into your business operations and rely on an expert’s help to streamline your daily tasks with the best fitting tools along with automation as a bottom-line booster, IT Visionists is the right place to get started.