About San Diego Regional Center

San Diego Regional Center is a nonprofit organization in California that works closely with the Department of Developmental Services (DDS). Regional centers coordinate services for individuals with developmental disabilities and their families.

SDRC is part of a statewide network of 20+ regional centers. The IT team supports tools used across offices and handles escalations when local teams need deeper application support.

Chris is the Assistant Manager of Application Support for SANDIS, a core case management system. Much of the work involves QA, UAT, enhancements, and bug validation, often with sensitive client-related screenshots, which makes workflow tooling a compliance and operations decision, not just a productivity choice.

The challenge

Before Plane, the QA and feedback workflow was built on friction and delay.

A slow feedback loop by design
Analysts tested new SANDIS releases and wrote findings in an offline two-column Word template (screenshots on the left, notes on the right). Each analyst emailed their document to a single person who manually consolidated multiple documents, rewrote the summary into an email, routed it to another manager, and only then reached developers.

That chain created predictable failure modes:

• No real-time collaboration or shared view of progress
• Manual consolidation as a bottleneck
• Status updates trapped in inboxes instead of attached to the work
• Long turnaround for responses and fixes because every step was a handoff

The result was consistent. What should have been quick back-and-forth routinely took 1.5 to 2 weeks.

Sensitive artifacts and nonprofit constraints
A lot of QA evidence included screenshots that could not be casually uploaded to third-party SaaS without enterprise-grade compliance and contracts. For a nonprofit, that quickly becomes cost-prohibitive.

Tool bloat fatigue
The team had exposure to common project management tools through vendors and developers, especially Jira. Chris’ view was blunt: too opinionated, too many surfaces, too much time spent operating the tool itself.

Volume kept rising
They process hundreds of tickets a day, most of it enhancement and feedback. The old workflow did not scale. It amplified delays and made it harder for stakeholders to see what was happening with what they submitted.

Why Plane was the best fit

Plane matched SDRC’s constraints and fixed the real operational problem, not just the document format.

• Self-hosted control for a HIPAA reality
  Self-hosting was the non-negotiable. It lets the team keep sensitive QA artifacts inside their own environment, avoid expensive compliance add-ons, and keep full control over data.
• Closing the loop between analysts and developers
  The core win was not replacing Word. It was eliminating the handoff chain.
  With Plane, developers can respond inside the same work item that contains the evidence and context, collapsing turnaround time dramatically.
• Views and filters that made a bloated backlog usable
  As the project grew, views became the way they stayed operational. Without views and filters, the backlog would be unmanageable.
• Visibility without exposing everything
  As they matured, they needed certain staff to see the status of feedback they submitted, especially leadership, without giving broad access to internal discussion and sensitive artifacts. This was a major reason to move beyond Community Edition. On Community Edition, they tried workarounds by creating a separate workspace, but it created duplication, manual syncing, and extra overhead. Guest access and controlled sharing removed the need for duplicating work across workspaces.
• Clear pricing and no surprises
  Plane’s pricing and docs were straightforward, and that documentation reflected what was actually available in-product, which reduced procurement anxiety and avoided “gotcha” moments.

Implementation and rollout

Plane was introduced to a team spanning new grads to very experienced staff. Adoption was fast because the old system was visibly painful and the improvement was immediate.

QA findings shifted from isolated Word files into structured work items, the manual consolidation step stopped being a bottleneck, and developers and analysts could collaborate in the same thread on the same artifact. The team also set up views to make triage and tracking repeatable as volume grew.

Since adopting Plane

The impact showed up in speed, accountability, and reduction of operational stress.

• A faster feedback cycle
  The team moved from multi-week response loops to same-day back-and-forth in many cases, because the work no longer needs to travel through inboxes.
• Nothing gets lost in inboxes
  A major stress point in the old workflow was losing track of updates across email threads. Plane made status and discussion observable and persistent, attached to the work itself.
• Stakeholder can self-serve status
  Stakeholders can track progress without chasing the IT team for updates, and without the team maintaining duplicate “public” copies of work.
• Intake is getting standardized at the source
  They are exploring intake forms and custom work item properties so enhancements arrive structured from the start. They are also experimenting with API-driven creation of work items from external ticketing systems.