Project management platform for an architectural design firm, via Full Stack Remote

Before a single house goes up, someone has to design it. Floor plans, elevations, permit sets, and revisions all come out of an architecture studio, and for firms that work with homebuilders, they come out in volume and on deadline.

That makes a design firm's real product its people's time. Every hour a designer spends belongs to a project, a client, and a budget. When the firm can't see who's working on what, two things happen. Some people get double-booked while others wait for work, and hours drift onto the wrong project, so nobody can say for sure what a job actually cost.

With many projects moving at once, the software that tracks all this stops being back-office admin. It's how the studio keeps its promises to clients and knows whether it's making money doing so.

Full Stack Remote connects companies with development teams, and stays involved through selection and quality assurance rather than handing over a CV and stepping back. They brought us in to work for their client, a US architectural design firm we can't name, with three decades of experience in residential design and national homebuilders among its clients.

The job was to take over the firm's existing project management application and move it forward. Taking over someone else's codebase is its own kind of risk. The system was live and in daily use, so there was no quiet period to learn it in. Every assumption we hadn't yet uncovered was a chance to break something the studio was relying on that afternoon.

And the work couldn't just be caretaking. The platform needed new capability at the same time as it needed bringing up to date, two jobs that usually compete for the same hours.

We started where a takeover has to start: learning the system well enough to change it safely.

From there we ran technology modernization, bringing the platform up to current versions rather than letting it drift further behind. It's unglamorous work, but it keeps a codebase hirable, patchable, and secure. It's the difference between a system that can be maintained and one that can only be replaced.

The larger piece was the backend. We rewrote the REST API in .NET, giving the platform a clean, current foundation for everything built on top of it. A rewrite on a live system is the moment most handovers go wrong, so we did it deliberately and in step with the existing application. The running product was never the thing being experimented on.

The first major addition was a resourcing module with a calendar-based interface.

Resourcing is where design studios lose time without noticing. A designer is promised to two projects in the same week, a specialist sits idle while another job waits on them, and nobody spots it until a deadline has already slipped. Put it on a calendar and the conflict shows up before it costs anything.

That's the real deliverable here. It isn't a feature so much as the ability to see next week before it happens, instead of explaining it afterward.

We then built out task tracking, planning, and execution, so each project's work lives in the same place as the people assigned to it.

Alongside it came an accounting code-tracking tool, which closes the loop that matters most to whoever signs off the budget. Hours and cost stop being two separate records reconciled at month end. They become one picture, current enough to act on, so the firm knows what each project really costs while there's still time to do something about it.

The platform runs on .NET, Angular, TypeScript, and MS SQL Server, a deliberately mainstream and well-supported combination.

On a system meant to run for years and pass between teams, that's a feature in itself. It keeps hiring straightforward, keeps upgrade paths open, and means the next developer who opens the codebase finds something familiar rather than something clever.

We picked the platform up in 2023 and we're still developing and maintaining it, with the client happy with what's been delivered.

The measure of a takeover isn't the handover week. It's whether, a year or two later, the system is further ahead than where it started and still safe to change. This one is modernized under the hood, extended where the studio needed it most, and built to keep absorbing new work, which is exactly what the platform behind a busy design firm has to do.