Can you run an architecture practice on a generic project tool?

More architecture practices run on Asana, Trello, Monday or Notion than on every purpose-built architecture tool combined. That is not a failure of taste. Those products are excellent, everybody already knows how to use them, and they cost a fraction of specialist software.

So the useful question is not whether they work — they demonstrably do — but where they stop. In our experience that point is specific, predictable, and arrives from one of four directions.

Where generic tools genuinely win

• Adoption. Nobody needs training, which is the single largest hidden cost of specialist software.
• Flexibility. Your process, not the vendor's opinion of your process.
• Price, especially at two to five people.
• Task management proper. For assigning work and tracking it, they are better than most specialist tools' built-in task modules, including in some respects ours.

The four points where it breaks

1. The third concurrent project

One project on a board is clear. Three is a context-switching problem no board layout solves, because the question stops being 'what is happening on this project' and becomes 'across everything, what is late and what is unbilled'. Boards answer the first question well and the second one not at all.

2. The first serious revision dispute

A card can hold an attachment. It cannot express that revision C supersedes revision B, was issued to four parties on a date, and that a fifth party was never on the transmittal. When that becomes the question — and on a construction project it eventually does — the board has no answer and neither does the file share.

3. Money entering the picture

The moment fees, milestones and site costs need to live alongside the work, a generic tool becomes a task list next to a spreadsheet. Two systems, one of them always stale. Which is where most practices are, and it works — at the cost of a monthly reconciliation nobody counts as work.

4. The person who built the system leaves

This is the one that actually hurts. A well-designed Notion workspace is somebody's craft. When they go, the automations break in ways nobody else understands, and the practice discovers its operations were resting on a side project.

Ofivio started as exactly this — an internal system inside one studio. We know the failure mode because we lived it. The difference is that we kept building instead of watching it decay.

An honest decision rule

If you sit in row one or two, we are not the right purchase today and we would rather say so than sell you a trial that disappoints. Rows three and four are the practices Ofivio was built for.