🧭 Context
Handicap International (HI) is a hands-on NGO operating in over 60 countries. To structure its long-term vision, the organization relies on a 10-year strategy, broken down into a complex 7-level project hierarchy.
Until recently, project management relied on a legacy in-house tool that could no longer meet HI’s needs: rigid, outdated, and unable to keep pace with strategic and operational changes. HI was looking for a modern, flexible solution that could handle this complex structure… while adding a new layer of operational action plan management.
❗Challenges
At HI, the stakes were high. Their organization, structured across seven hierarchical levels, demanded a solution that was both precise and quick to deploy.
Traditionally, NGOs like HI have relied on custom-built software because off-the-shelf solutions lacked the flexibility to meet their specific requirements. But this approach came with limitations:
- Very high initial costs
- Limited maintenance
- Outdated interfaces
- Low scalability
- Often abandoned after a few years due to lack of agility
HI’s internal tool had reached the end of its life: too heavy to maintain, too complex to replace with a standard solution, and not dynamic enough to engage project managers and contributors. It was a real barrier to efficiently managing projects, missions, and action plans in one unified space.
🛠️ Solution
This is where Kostango made the difference, combining the best of both worlds:
👉 The simplicity and user-friendliness of standard software
👉 With the power and flexibility of a tailored solution, thanks to low-code technology
Within just a few weeks, a fully customized working environment was deployed:
🌐 Faithful recreation of the strategic hierarchy with automatic cascading progress calculations
🔑 Fine-grained permissions aligned with roles and hierarchical levels
💰 Integrated financial and qualitative project tracking in a single interface
📊 Custom dashboards for real-time project monitoring
📅 Gantt and calendar views to structure review cycles
✅ Action plans directly integrated into the same platform
Result: clear, smooth, and scalable project management.
✅ Results
The impact was immediate, from headquarters to the field:
👥 3x more project managers actively engaged, thanks to a modern, intuitive interface adopted without heavy training
📈 +40% of actions tracked through to completion, demonstrating better contributor accountability
⏱️ Reporting time cut in half, thanks to data centralization and automation
🔄 3 business processes centralized (projects, actions, missions) in a single platform, eliminating duplicates and separate files
HI has now found a long-term ally in Kostango: the flexibility of a modular solution without the constraints of heavy, rigid development.
