Build a System to Automatically Create Project Backlogs

Most service businesses rely on manual copy-paste. A project manager receives a signed PDF and spends hours manually creating tickets in Jira or Asana. This process is slow, expensive, and guarantees human error. Key deliverables are missed, timelines are misinterpreted, and the delivery team starts every project with incomplete information.

Off-the-shelf document management tools like PandaDoc or DocuSign have integrations that create a project when a proposal is signed. These integrations are shallow. They create a single project shell but cannot parse the actual content of the Scope of Work (SOW). They signal that a deal closed, but do not transfer the 50 specific tasks required to complete it. Similarly, CRM integrations from HubSpot or Salesforce can create a Jira project from a closed deal, but the detailed scope lives in the proposal PDF, not the CRM.

Consider a 15-person digital agency that signs a 20-page SOW. The project manager spends the next 3 hours creating 45 tickets in Jira. Two weeks later, the client asks about a sub-task for A/B testing that was buried on page 12 and missed during manual transfer. The project is already off-track because the handoff from sales to delivery was a human process, not a system.

The structural problem is that these tools manage document state (signed, pending), not document content. Their data models are not built for semantic understanding. An API that tells you a document was signed is fundamentally different from one that understands "Phase 1 deliverables include a full site audit and wireframes for five key pages, due EOD Friday, Week 2." This requires specialized AI engineering.

The engagement begins by auditing 10-15 of your recently signed proposals. Syntora analyzes their structure to identify common sections like "Deliverables," "Timeline," and "Exclusions," which informs the parsing strategy. We simultaneously map the data structure of your target project management tool, whether it is Jira, Asana, or Linear.

A FastAPI service provides an endpoint to receive the proposal PDF. This service uses the Claude API to parse the document, extracting structured data like tasks, descriptions, phases, and dependencies. Syntora has built similar document processing pipelines for complex financial analysis. The same pattern of using Pydantic models to validate AI-extracted data ensures the information sent to your project management tool's API is accurate and complete.

The delivered system is a private API that your operations team uses after a deal closes. They send the signed PDF to the API, and a fully populated project appears in your PM tool in under 60 seconds. You receive the complete Python source code, deployment on AWS Lambda, and a runbook detailing how to maintain the system.