Savills Replaces Azure DevOps with ClickUp for Multi-Country PMO

In Frame

Well-run projects, scattered across systems

When Cherry Wong built Savills' regional PMO, she was running delivery at a scale most IT teams never reach — CRM rollouts and custom systems shipping across Hong Kong, India, Vietnam, and China, some built in-house, some delivered by vendors. The work was well-run. The tools holding it just couldn't see each other.

Azure DevOps handled source code and tickets, but its all-or-nothing sharing made cross-team work awkward, and a project only really existed once development began. Everything upstream — requests, feedback, bug lists — lived in Excel.

Cherry WongIT Business Partner, Savills

"Previously we logged everything through Excel, with different versions flying around. Whenever the dev team closed a ticket, I'd go back into the sheet by hand and update it — this is done, this is ready for UAT."

The cost is compounded across geographies. Keeping different countries in sync meant scheduling status calls, chasing updates, and waiting on availability across time zones. Leadership visibility ran on a monthly ritual of its own: collecting updates from every country, consolidating them into separate PowerPoint decks, and assembling a master presentation for the CIO. The people who understood the projects best were spending their time reporting on them instead of moving them forward.

The Solution

Why another spreadsheet wouldn't do

Cherry didn't swap tools on a hunch. She stood up a full evaluation team to put ClickUp head-to-head against Zoho Project, Teamwork, and monday.com, testing each against the one thing Savills actually needed: automation that could move work across stages and countries without a person pushing it along. Some couldn't handle an agile framework at all. One, Cherry says, felt like "a colorful Excel with no real automation."

The verdict pointed right back at the world they were trying to leave. Another spreadsheet, however polished, was never going to carry every country. ClickUp won on roadmap, innovation, and automation.

The verdict pointed right back at the world they were trying to leave. Another spreadsheet, however polished, was never going to carry all countries. ClickUp won on the automation and roadmap.

Every project, under a single record

So Cherry's team rebuilt delivery around a single front door. Requests come in through forms with built-in checklists — use case, approvals, required inputs — and a demand board vets them before anything becomes a live project.

From there, one record carries the work the whole way: the enhancement request, the product backlog, and whatever bugs follow all sit under one parent ClickUp ID. Ian Or, who runs a ten-person CRM delivery team across India, Hong Kong, and China, says that months later they can still trace exactly what was deployed and what caused an issue.

Nothing gets re-keyed between systems, and the history travels with the work. The team added fields for root cause, resolution, and prevention, so every closed bug leaves a record that the next project can learn from. They didn't just move their process into a new tool — they made it smarter than before, with better project governance along the way.

The Impact

Fifty hours a month, handed back

The chase disappeared next. When an item hits "ready for development," the vendor team is assigned automatically — "I don't even need to say 'this ticket is ready," Cherry says; "the moment it moves to the next stage, the right person is already on it."

The day-to-day conversation moved into the work itself. The day-to-day conversation moved into the work itself. This is the terrain Ian Or knows best — a distributed delivery team that used to run on scheduled calls across three time zones. Now vendors leave their questions as comments, his business analysts answer in the same thread, the QA team also re-verified, and the whole exchange stays attached to the ticket for good — so the answer is still there months later when someone asks why. A screenshot or screen recording reproduces a bug in seconds, with no proof-of-issue call to book.

For Ian, that changed the shape of the week.

Ian OrSenior Project Manager, Savills

"ClickUp gave us back 50+ hours a month. Instead of scheduling calls and waiting on everyone's availability, we just develop and resolve things in the task thread. For a 10-person team across India, Hong Kong, and China, that's a whole person's productivity we didn't know we were losing."

Transparency as a byproduct

The same project registry that runs the teams feeds the CIO dashboard, so visibility became a byproduct of doing the work rather than a task on top of it. Management checks project health and spots at-risk initiatives in real time and whenever they need it — no decks, no consolidation, no month-old numbers. And because estimates now sit beside actuals, a job that runs 50 hours against a 20-hour estimate tells the team why: scope creep, an underestimate, or a change request.

Cherry WongIT Business Partner (former PMO Lead), Savills

"Previously, we'd call each country every month for project updates, then build 20 different PowerPoints into a master deck for management. Now every project rolls up live to a CIO dashboard, so our CIO just logs in to see active and at-risk projects."

Looking ahead

The month-end deck is gone

Cherry Wong built a PMO to hold all countries of software delivery in one view. The clearest sign it worked is how little of it now runs through her. A ticket closes without anyone opening a spreadsheet. A vendor picks up the next stage without a nudge. The month ends without twenty decks stitched into one.

What Cherry handed back to the team isn't only hours, though there are plenty of those. It's attention. The people who used to spend their weeks reporting on projects now spend them moving projects — and the system Cherry designed with ClickUp is what lets a small team deliver at the scale a 170-year-old firm expects.

Cherry Wong IT Business Partner, Savills

"Project Managers used to spend their time proving to management that work was happening. Now the dashboard proves it for them, and Project Managers spend that time making sure the work is actually good."