Consultants, especially Environmental Planners, have to balance many factors and entities to accomplish their work. They must commit to their clients to provide solutions to water resource planning, redevelopment and capitol improvement projects while considering the site specific setting's physical, chemical and biological factors and scientific, technical and engineering factors when taking on a project.

Planners are challenged to meet the local public resource needs consistent with land and water policies, often compiled in comprehensive planning documents that must comply with federal, state and local laws, regulations and ordinances. Working closely with clients, public interest groups, property owners and municipalities through a variety of media (not directly captured) causes misinterpretation, miscommunication, and other lost in translation business problems leading to missed project deadlines.

Our case study is Environmental Community Opportunity Network (ECON). This rapidly growing company has a unique structure that has many clients, contractors and sub-contractors who work together on the same projects. They needed a paperless planning solution to assign and sort projects by multiple entities and filter the results for effective reporting. PlanDone solved their challenge by expanding the roles and responsibilities of the projects section to accommodate unlimited, business, network relationships.

To complete projects and tasks on time with an online, collaboration plan, environmental planning consulting professionals should:

1. Document Upfront - Immediately document the objectives, management approach, scope, deliverables, estimated hours, cost, and milestones.

2. Spotlight Speedbumps - Proactively assess the risks, assumptions, issues, definitions with short and long term goals with measurement for success.

3. Leadership Hand-off - Get executive planning buy-in and sign-off to delegate the execution to the task teams.

4. Listen and Be Heard - Encourage and capture input of all citizens, elected officials, administrators, landowners and support staff as innovative ideas come from all levels of organizations building trust and confidence in an open system.

5. Catagorize and Sort - Break projects down by client and type of work to extend sorting ability for sub-contractors who work on many projects simultaneously but want to filter all projects by their participation.

6. Upload Once for All - Utilize an online repository of all documentation attached to the specific projects and tasks so there will be no more searching for and losing that critical email or file.

7. Auto Invoice Actual Time - Generate timesheet reports by project or person with billable rates to avoid manual time tracking for different rates for different projects.

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