Disciplinary case stall-point dashboard
Problem
A disciplinary case moves through intake, evidence gathering, hearing scheduling and decision, but the only record of where a given case actually sits is the compliance officer's personal spreadsheet and an email thread whose subject line has been reused for months. Ask how long a case takes on average from complaint to decision and the honest answer is a guess. Ask why one case took eleven weeks and another took two, and the answer is usually the same: it depended on when the volunteer disciplinary sub-committee chair had a free evening to convene a hearing. Nobody notices a case has stalled until a club rings to ask why a suspended player is still listed as available, or why a hearing still has not been scheduled two months after the incident report was filed.
Product idea
A dashboard built from timestamps already sitting in the case tracker and, where the tracker is incomplete, from dates entered from the email trail. It plots each open case against the stages it should pass through and shows how long it has sat in the current one, weighed against the spread of how long that stage normally takes across past cases. It aggregates by stage and by the person or committee holding the case, so a pattern such as hearings routed through one committee waiting three times longer than others becomes visible without singling out one case by name. It does not schedule hearings, send reminders or record decisions. It does not touch a case record. It answers one question: where does time actually go, and does that match what the disciplinary code assumes.
Who it is for
Compliance officers and general secretaries who need to explain case handling times to a board or a governing body, and league operations managers trying to see the disciplinary process as it actually runs rather than as the code describes it.
Possible first version
A read-only web dashboard fed by a CSV export from the case tracker, with a manual entry screen for cases where key dates only exist in email. It shows stage-by-stage elapsed time per open case, a distribution of past case durations by stage, and a flag on any case outside the normal range. Aggregation is by stage and by named handler, viewable only by roles the office decides on. Version one has no live connection to the case tracker or email system: refreshing the picture means running the export again, which is a deliberate limit, not an oversight.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 4-6 week first release
- Roles involved
- Compliance officer, General secretary, League operations manager
- Relevant to
- League office, Federation / governing body, Women's league, Collegiate athletics
- Systems in play
- Case and disciplinary trackers, Email and shared drives, Spreadsheets
- Product framing
- Find the bottleneck
Questions we get asked
Our compliance officer already tracks this in her own spreadsheet. What does a dashboard add?
Her spreadsheet tells you where one case is today, if she has kept it current. It does not tell you that hearings routed through one committee take three times as long as the rest, or that the gap between incident report and decision has grown over two seasons. Those patterns only show up once dozens of cases are laid against each other, which a spreadsheet designed to track one case at a time cannot show, however well it is kept.
What do you need from us on day one?
An export from the case tracker with a date for each stage a case has passed through: intake, evidence, hearing scheduled, hearing held, decision, sanction communicated. Most trackers hold some of these cleanly and others only in a free-text note or not at all. The first version will have gaps, filled in by hand from the email trail where needed, and the picture will get more accurate as the office gets more disciplined about logging dates rather than writing them in a comments box.
Does this replace our case tracker or the disciplinary process itself?
No. It reads from the tracker and from email dates entered by hand; it does not schedule a hearing, record a decision or send a reminder to anyone. If the case tracker goes down or nobody exports data for a month, the dashboard simply goes stale rather than blocking any part of the actual process. It is a mirror held up to the process, not a step inside it.
What if the bottleneck turns out to be one named person? Do we actually want to see that?
Possibly not, and that is worth deciding before switching it on rather than after. The default view aggregates by stage, not by name, so a slow pattern is visible without pointing at anyone. A handler-level view exists because sometimes that is exactly the conversation a general secretary needs to have, but who can see it should be agreed deliberately. Built quietly and shown to everyone by surprise, it will damage trust faster than the stalled cases ever did.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
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