Case study
How Angelus24 went from 27 to 64 housing estates in six months, with one extra hire
Claude
ChatGPT
Gemini
Angelus24
Angelus24 manages more than 2,200 properties in Poland. It rents and renovates apartments, manages commercial space and runs facility management for the buildings in its care. Every service request, from a routine repair to an emergency call-out, lands on the same small team. That team is eight people.
Toolkit used in the transformation
-
Asana
service requests and projects
-
Google Drive
file storage
-
Slite
knowledge base
-
Miro
online whiteboard
Coaches running the transformation
Before
- Service requests arrived by phone, by email and on paper, and no single list showed what was still open
- Seven tools tried over the years – Redmine, Bitrix24, Monday.com, EasyProject, Jira with a helpdesk, osTicket, SugarCRM – and none of them became a habit
- Six months of setting up Asana in-house, with no agreed way of using it
- A request could sit between channels before anyone owned it
- No company-wide view: the status of a job lived with whoever took the call, so finding it meant asking
After
- Most service requests now come in through one Asana form, and each lands with an owner, a priority, a due date and a due time
- A real-time dashboard shows the whole team what is open and who is on it, in the office or on the Asana mobile app
- Emails are redirected into Asana automatically, so the inbox stopped being where work lived
- Each person works from their own task list, and project notes carry a due date and a named owner
- SOPs are written down, so a new person learns the process from a page instead of a colleague
- 10× less time spent putting out fires, and 64 housing estates serviced instead of 27, with one extra person
Introduction
Why a team that kept up with 2,200 properties needed a different system
Angelus24 manages more than 2,200 properties in Poland with a team of eight. In six months they went from servicing 27 housing estates to 64 with one extra person, after seven different tools and a six-month attempt on their own had not stuck.
Start with what was working, because a lot was. Angelus24 delivered. Their leadership was not reacting to a crisis – they wanted the company to run better, and they kept looking for how. In property maintenance that is a harder brief than it sounds. The work never arrives in order: a routine repair, a tenant’s question, a building project and an emergency can all land in the same hour, and none of them waits for the others to finish.
For years the requests came in the way people chose to send them – by phone, by email, on paper. A small team can carry that in its head, and Angelus24’s did. But every new estate adds requests to channels nobody can see across at once, and at some point the difference stops being something a team can absorb personally. That point is the operational ceiling. It arrives when a company grows, not because it gets worse.
Angelus24 did not wait for it. They tried Redmine, Bitrix24, Monday.com, EasyProject, Jira with a helpdesk, osTicket and SugarCRM. Then they set up Asana themselves and gave it six months. Each time, the tool worked and the habit did not form.
That pattern is the most common one we see. Software doesn’t change how people work. Habits do. None of those tools came with an agreed way of using it: where a request goes in, who owns it, when it is due, how the team sees it. After six months of trial and error, Angelus24 went looking for outside help – not an eighth tool, but a way of working the tool could hold.
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What’s behind
Built from 8 years of transformations & Asana implementations, combining principles from Agile, Holacracy, and leadership coaching. Not a template — a system designed to change how your organisation operates. Permanently.
We find the real bottlenecks
We design the work operating system
We rewire habits
We make it stick
Solution
How we did it, stage by stage
Four stages, delivered October to November 2020. They carry their current Reliability Protocol names: the Protocol has grown since, but these stages share its core.
Stage 1
Implementation Plan
Before anything was configured, we agreed in writing what the system had to achieve.
Why it mattered: every later decision had something to be checked against. With seven tools behind them, Angelus24 did not need more features. They needed a reason to keep using one.
Stage 2
Mapping and Implementing Workflows
The team had its own word for the work that never stopped: bieżączka, the daily stream of small, urgent service requests. We mapped it as one procedure, with a RACI for who does what, and then built it:
- one Asana form as the main way in, with every request landing with an owner, a priority, a due date and a due time
- incoming emails redirected into Asana automatically
- a real-time dashboard showing what is open, at which stage, and when it is due
Why it mattered: a request no longer depended on which channel it happened to arrive through.
Stage 3
Work Conventions
The conventions were small and written down:
- One project per property, always named the same way: city code, street, number.
- Three columns on every board: New, In progress, Done.
- A team-conventions document and written SOPs, so the rules did not live in one person’s head.
Why it mattered: across dozens of estates, a naming rule is what lets anyone find a building’s work without asking a colleague.
Stage 4
Training
Onboarding sessions ran through October and November 2020, including the Asana mobile app for the people who work on site. Between sessions the team had weekly homework, done on their real requests.
Why it mattered: old manual habits do not disappear because a new tool arrives. We showed the team exactly what Asana replaced – the email inbox as a to-do list, the paper note, the phone message – and had them practise the replacement every week until it was the default.
Results
What changed in six months
| What we measured | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Where service requests came in | Phone, email and paper | Mostly the Asana form, then email, then phone |
| Every request has an owner, priority, due date and due time | Not guaranteed | Every request |
| Seeing what is open | Ask whoever took the call | Real-time dashboard, in the office or on mobile |
| Tools tried before one stuck | 7 | 1, still in use |
| Housing estates serviced | 27 | 64 (+137%) |
| Team | 7 people | 8 people |
| Share of time spent putting out fires (ad-hoc work) | 50% | 5% (10× less) |
Half of the team’s time used to go to ad-hoc work. Six months later it was 5% – that is where the 10× comes from.
Since we left
What happened after we stepped back
- The team kept growing on the same system: from 8 people in spring 2021 to 14 by February 2022.
- Asana is still how Angelus24 runs its service requests. Tomasz renewed it for another full year in April 2025, four and a half years after the first training session.
We design for departure. The measure of a transformation is what the team is still doing when we are no longer in the room.
What’s in it for you?
Four things you can act on this week
- Give your firefighting a name and a front door. Angelus24 called theirs bieżączka, the daily stream of small, urgent requests. Once it had a name, it could have a procedure: one form, an owner, a priority, a due time. Count how many channels your requests arrive through today. Every channel above one is a place where a request can wait unseen.
- Write the rules before you buy the next tool. Angelus24 tried seven. What finally stuck was not an eighth tool but an agreed answer to four questions: where a request goes in, who owns it, when it is due, and how the team sees it. That answer fits on one page and costs a meeting.
- Pick one naming rule and never break it. One project per property, named city code, street, number. It sounds trivial. Across dozens of estates it is the difference between anyone finding a building’s work in seconds and asking the one person who remembers.
- Set homework between training sessions. The Angelus24 team practised on their real requests every week between sessions, not on a demo project. Habits form in the work, not in the training room.
What Angelus24 says
The only one that ever stuck
What changed for Tomasz is not a feature. Before, knowing where a service request stood meant asking whoever took it. Now it is in the dashboard – for him and for the manager who runs the property administrators – without a phone call.
When we sent him the first version of this case study, his reply was two sentences: “Beautiful, and true. If anyone wants to check, they can call me and I’ll confirm it.”
And his verdict, after seven tools:
We tried every possible task and support ticket management tool over the years. Asana is the only one that ever stuck.
Tomasz Orechwo
CEO Angelus24
FAQ
Within six months of the October 2020 kickoff, Angelus24 was servicing 64 housing estates instead of 27, with one extra person on the team. The four implementation stages themselves ran in October and November 2020.
Most service requests now come in through one Asana form and land with an owner, a priority, a due date and a due time. Emails are redirected into Asana automatically, a real-time dashboard shows what is open, and written conventions and SOPs keep everyone working the same way.
The earlier tools arrived without an agreed way of using them. At Angelus24 the conventions came first - where a request goes in, who owns it, when it is due - and weekly practice on real requests made them habits. Five years later the team still runs its service requests in Asana.
No. Angelus24 manages more than 2,200 properties with a team of eight. The system is what lets a small team take on more estates without hiring to match.
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