A conversation about decisions, data, and why the most expensive thing in a growing company is a question nobody can answer quickly.
Ask most executives at a fast-growing services firm how they make their biggest weekly calls, and you will hear some version of the same answer: they ask around. A message to one manager, a spreadsheet from another, a hallway update from someone who might be out of date. By the time the picture comes together, the decision is already late.
Vivek Udaykumar decided that was a software problem, not a people problem. As Head of Project Management at Lima, he designed and built an executive decision dashboard inside the company’s own client tracking application, a tool he built from the ground up as its sole developer and product owner. Today, Lima’s leadership team runs the business from it every week.
Vivek is a member of the Operators Guild, an invitation-only global collective of senior operating executives that admits fewer than one in ten of the people it considers. He is a Kairos Fellow, selected by the Kairos Global Selection Committee for his potential to shape the future through project management and operations. And he is the author of The Only PM in the Room, a practical guide for senior project managers trying to scale small businesses without drowning them in the corporate process. We talked with him about the dashboard, the decisions it changed, and what operators everywhere can take from it.
The problem behind the problem
Q: Hi Vivek – it’s lovely to have you. Tell me, Lima already had a project management system you’d built. Why did leadership need something else?Hi sure – Because a system that helps a team do the work is not the same as a system that helps leaders decide what to do next. By late 2025 we had hundreds of active client matters and a team that had grown several times over. The delivery side was running well. But every week, the founders and the operations and finance leads still had to make the same handful of high-stakes calls: how many new clients to take on, whether to hire, which cases to move to a different owner, what to escalate, who needed a follow-up, and what money was still outstanding. And the inputs for those calls lived in a dozen places.
Q: What did that look like in practice?
It looked like three to five days of status gathering before anyone could commit to anything. Someone would ask, “Can we take on more clients this month?” and the honest answer was, “Give me a few days to find out.” In a business where client deadlines are real and missing one can affect someone’s case, that delay is a risk in itself.
Starting with the decision, not the data
Q: Most dashboards start with “what data do we have?” Where did you start?
I started with the people. I sat down with each member of the leadership team and asked one question: what decisions do you make every single week, and what would you need to see to make them in five minutes instead of five days? We landed on six recurring decisions. Then, for each one, I wrote down exactly what information it required. Only after that did I design the data underneath it.
Q: Why that order?
Because a dashboard built around data becomes a museum. Lots of charts, nobody acts on them. A dashboard built around decisions becomes a tool. Every panel on ours exists because a specific leader makes a specific call from it.
Q: Walk us through what’s actually on the screen.
There are panels for overdue and at-risk matters, blocked cases, missing client evidence, writer capacity versus incoming workload, and revenue at risk from delayed delivery or unpaid invoices. Each metric has red, yellow, and green thresholds, so leadership doesn’t have to interpret anything. If it’s red, it needs a decision this week. Everything is calculated from live records in the system, clients, matters, workflow stages, deliverables, deadlines, owners, payment status, so nobody is preparing a report. The report prepares itself.
The decisions it changed
Q: Give us a concrete example of the dashboard changing a call.
The clearest one is intake. Shortly after launch, the capacity panel showed that incoming work was running well ahead of what our writers could actually deliver. Before the dashboard, we would have found that out the hard way, through missed deadlines. Instead, leadership chose to stagger new client kickoffs over several weeks rather than starting them all at once. That single decision prevented dozens of late deliverables over the following quarter.
Q: And hiring?
Same panel, different decision. Once leadership could see the backlog against capacity in plain numbers, the case for adding writers made itself. We hired and trained additional letter writers, and monthly delivery capacity rose by roughly a quarter. Nobody had to argue for headcount on instinct.
Q: What about cases that were already in trouble?
That’s the at-risk panel. In its first couple of months it flagged a group of matters that were approaching deadlines while their owners were blocked. We reassigned them, and overdue matters dropped by nearly three quarters. The evidence panel did something similar for client documents. Collecting missing paperwork used to drag on for close to two weeks. Targeted follow-ups triggered from the dashboard cut that by more than half.
Q: And the finance side?
The revenue-at-risk panel surfaced a six-figure sum in delayed or unpaid fees that had been sitting in different corners of the business. Leadership prioritized it, and it was followed up and collected within a quarter. That’s money that was always owed to us. We just couldn’t see it all in one place.
Killing the status meeting
Q: You also replaced the weekly leadership meeting. That’s a bold move.
It sounds bold, but it was mostly subtraction. The old meeting was a status meeting: an hour of people reading updates to each other. Now I run a 30-minute decision review straight from the dashboard. We don’t ask “where are we?” anymore because everyone already knows. We only discuss what’s red and decide what to do about it. Decisions that used to take days now happen the same day, in one sitting.
Q: Did the rest of the team feel the difference?
Very much. Finding any client’s stage, owner, and next step used to take around twenty minutes of searching. Now it takes about two. Across the whole team that adds up to thousands of hours a year that go back into actual client work instead of hunting for information. New hires can read a client’s full history in minutes, and every stage, handoff, and decision is timestamped, which matters a lot in work where accuracy and a dependable record are non-negotiable.
Q: Getting people to actually keep data current is where most of these projects die. How did you handle it?
I migrated every active client into the system and trained the entire team on it, more than twenty people. And I made the data useful to the people entering it, not just to leadership. If updating a record also saves you from answering the same question three times a day, you keep it updated. Adoption follows usefulness.
Beyond Lima
Q: Your book is called The Only PM in the Room. How much of this dashboard is in it?
The philosophy is all in there. The book is about being the one person in a small company whose job is to turn chaos into a repeatable way of working, without importing heavy corporate frameworks that a twelve-person team doesn’t need. The dashboard is the natural next chapter. First you make the work visible to the people doing it. Then you make it visible to the people steering the company.
Q: You’re part of the Operators Guild and you’re a Kairos Fellow. What do those communities give you?
Pressure-testing. In the Operators Guild I’m around senior operators who have scaled companies through every kind of growth, and when you explain your system to someone like that, the weak spots show up fast. Kairos was formative earlier on. It’s a community built around the idea of solving problems where existing institutions haven’t innovated, and that mindset shaped how I approach operations. I don’t accept “this is just how it’s done” as a reason.
Q: Last question. What should a leader do if their own weekly decisions still run on chat threads and guesswork?
Write down the five or six decisions you make every week. Next to each one, write the information you wish you had when you made it. That list is your dashboard. You don’t need to buy anything to start. You need to know which decisions matter and what it takes to make them well. Everything else is just plumbing.
Q: Last question. What should a leader do if their own weekly decisions still run on chat threads and guesswork?
It is a fitting philosophy for someone who calls himself the only PM in the room. At Lima, the room is a lot quieter on Monday mornings now, and the decisions come a lot faster.
