The problem
Every engagement began with the same slow scramble: dozens of documents requested by email, returned in mixed formats, chased across weeks. The consultancy’s differentiator was judgment, but their clients’ first experience was administrative friction — and generic portals assumed a document checklist that didn’t match how the work is actually scoped.
The approach
We modeled the request list as a consequence of the engagement type rather than a static checklist, so each client only ever sees what genuinely applies to them. Then we designed the client’s side for someone doing this once, under time pressure, who has never seen the system before — plain language, obvious next step, no jargon inherited from the internal process.
Nudges were built in deliberately, and deliberately restrained: the system asks twice, then tells the consultant it’s time for a human conversation.
The result
Document collection that used to take three weeks of chasing now largely completes on its own. The consultancy’s first impression is competence rather than paperwork.