Full Sail Partners Blog | Full Sail Partners (11)

Deltek, Inc. recently announced at the Deltek Insight 2012 Conference that Full Sail Partners and its client, Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc. (WJE), have been selected for the Partner Award for Deltek’s 2012 Project Excellence Awards Program.  The Partner Award recognizes a Deltek partner, and customer, that together have delivered an exceptional Deltek solution implementation.

Full Sail Partners assisted Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., a prominent A/E/C firm ranked on Engineering News-Record's list of the Top 500 Design Firms in America, with the implementation of Deltek Vision across its business.  Full Sail Partners built numerous workflows in Deltek Vision such as conflict checking, project initiation, billing, and project status report.  As a result, WJE realized an annual savings of about $1.8 million and a reduction in DSOs of 45 days.  The cost to purchase and implement Deltek Vision paid for itself over 30 times in just one year. 

“As the leader in solving the world’s most challenging construction-related problems, WJE works on more than 7,000 projects a year. Our project management, time, and accounting systems must not let us down,” said WJE Associate Director of Finance and Controller, Steven Schmit.  “We are honored to receive this award recognizing the partnership between WJE and Full Sail Partners, whose expert guidance and support has been so critical to the successful implementation and ongoing operation of Deltek Vision within our firm.”

Since the awards program started in 2008, Deltek has recognized some of the most innovative, market-leading companies in the world. The Project Excellence Awards program, a key component of the annual Deltek Insight User Conference, was designed to highlight and honor unique achievement among Deltek's more than 14,500 customers worldwide.  The goal of this award program is to recognize outstanding Deltek customer and partner success in improving business processes and performance, increasing profitability and winning new business.

“We are very proud to be honored with the Project Excellence Partner Award with WJE.  We loved the challenge as presented by Steve and WJE” said Kevin O’Connor, President of Full Sail Partners. “The automation created by WJE and the FSP team brought forward a game changing level of efficiency. The implementation provided increased functionality, reduction of manual processes through automation, and timelier reporting and distribution which resulted in significant time savings. WJE has been a true partner with our firm and the close integration of the work we did is a testament to both or team’s commitment to excellence.” 

Good customer service is a rare commodity in this day and age of virtual customer support agents.   Business is done in an ultra-competitive arena where your direct competition is only a Google search away.  As a result, firms are developing customer relations management plans to help better serve their client base.  Has your firm ignored developing a plan to manage your customers?

A good customer relations management plan will act as a guideline for your firm when dealing with clients.  However, it is important to remember that there is no end-all-be-all remedy for customer support.  Some battles cannot be won, no matter how diligent and worthy your efforts.  This is why I compare having a strong plan, to a game of poker!

Much like in a game of poker, the typical customer service interaction involves some 'hidden cards' that you are not always privileged to see.  These hidden cards can be anything from possible prior negative history with your company, temperament, and maybe even personal issues that the customer is dealing with in their life.  It is because of these cards that we as customer service representatives, much like a seasoned poker player, must approach every hand as though we are playing with pocket ACES.

Pocket ACES are a poker player’s best friend.  The ACES acronym also happens to be easiest to remember four step processes for dealing with every day client interactions.

ACES stands for:

As a professional, it is your responsibility to play like poker legend Phil Hellmuth and go ’all in’ for your customers with pocket ACES!

Deltek recognizes Full Sail Partners as a top-performing business partner.

Full Sail Partners, offering business consulting, technology solutions, and application hosting for Deltek Vision, is chosen as a 2012 Deltek Premier Partner. Deltek, Inc., the leading global provider of enterprise software and information solutions for government contractors and professional services firms, offers this distinction to top-performing business partners. To achieve Premier Partner status, Full Sail Partners demonstrated continuing excellence in marketing, selling, implementing, and supporting their customers with Deltek solutions.

“Full Sail Partners continues to differentiate itself as a true industry thought leader and serves as an advocate for hundreds of clients,” said Claus Thorsgaard, Deltek’s EVP and General Manager – Professional Services.  “Our mutual clients appreciate Full Sail Partners’ ability to leverage Deltek Vision to provide insight on product enhancements, new product releases, and feature functionality.  I would like to congratulate Kevin O’Connor and everyone at Full Sail Partners. We are pleased to recognize the accomplishments and talents of the individuals of this top performing company.”

“We at Full Sail Partners are extremely honored and proud to once again be named a Deltek Premier Partner.  I am grateful to our clients who provided us the opportunity to continue to serve them in 2012,” said Kevin P. O’Connor, President of Full Sail Partners.  “The energy and professionalism the group at Full Sail Partners consistently brings speaks to their passion for providing quality services to our clients.”

The Full Sail Partner team sees that 2012 and beyond affords many opportunities to project-based clients with the release of Deltek Vision First Essentials and a host of software enhancements.  As a Deltek Premier Partner, Full Sail Partners is committed to working with clients to help strategically plan and leverage the solutions within the Vision suite of tools.  Full Sail Partners' team, collectively, brings more than 200 years of experience with Deltek products and is excited to unveil in late third quarter of 2012 unique technology solutions to assist with business needs.

About Full Sail Partners
Full Sail Partners specializes in client-focused technology solutions for architects and engineers, energy and environmental consultants, and professional service firms across the country. Full Sail Partners offers business consulting, technology solutions, and application hosting for Deltek Vision. Partnering with more than 1000 clients nationwide, Full Sail Partners builds long-term relationships and seeks to identify the critical resources to create a faster, more efficient, and cohesive business infrastructure.

Full Sail Partners – Keep Your Business on Course. | For more on Full Sail Partners profile and background on the Full Sail Partners crew, visit us at http://www.fullsailpartners.com.

About Deltek
Deltek (Nasdaq: PROJ) is the leading global provider of enterprise software and information solutions for professional services firms and government contractors. For decades, we have delivered actionable insight that empowers our customers to unlock their business potential. 15,000 organizations and 2 million users in over 80 countries around the world rely on Deltek to research and identify opportunities, win new business, optimize resources, streamline operations, and deliver more profitable projects. 

Deltek – Know more. Do More. | For more on Deltek, visit http://www.deltek.com.

A Cautionary Example of Using KPIs

If a Project Manager Falls Down in the Forest and No One is Around to See It, Does the Project Manger Still Get the Quarterly Bonus?

I have been giving a great deal of thought to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) lately.  One thought was about the idea of the unintended consequences of putting a “suite” of KPIs (KPIs are like potato chips, you can’t have just one. . .) in place, specifically for Project Managers.

How will their behavior change?  Will measuring chargeability for their project teams cause the employees to be more utilized or cause billable project to become less profitable?

Let me throw out an example.  This example is based upon a real client and provides KPI insight. The Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Company A wanted to incentivize their project managers to produce more revenue.  So, after months of discussion and planning, the partners setup revenue targets for each PM based upon past performance and a generously favorable potential revenue prediction for the next year.  The Project Managers would be paid a bonus at the end of each Quarter for any Revenue they brought in over the projected target.  This was very generous, and all the partners agreed that this would drive business revenues higher.

Except it didn’t happen exactly the way they wanted it to.

Here is a graph showing how their revenue was before this particular KPI was put in place:

And here is the before and after picture:

Ouch!

This of course caused their accounting team to load up on antacids for most of the year.  Their KPI (and bonus program based on that KPI) had encouraged some behavior that was not necessarily good.  The Project Managers did not care about recognizing any revenue (and by extension, billing the client) until the end of the quarter, and when they did, they typically over-recognized and over-billed.

This problem caused a cascade through-out the organization.  Clients noticed and started to question why this month’s bill was so much larger that last month’s.  Average AR started to go up.  Cash flow went down.  Lines of credit had to be accessed to make payroll (and pay the quarterly bonus).

How could this have been prevented?  Looking back, it is obvious right?  But at the time, this sounded like a great idea and everyone was committed to making it successful.

1. Too much focus on one KPI is not a good thing.  They should have used several measurements that touched upon AR, Chargeability, and (Project Managers cover your ears!), Client Satisfaction.
2. Quantitative measurements are great, but we also need some Qualitative measurements in the mix.
3. Involve many different types of people in your KPI development.  Someone might have pointed out this scenario at the beginning if the partners had not developed this on their own.

Which brings me to my final point... KPIs only help if you review them frequently and action is taken based upon them.  A well designed KPI exists to measure performance and if adjustments are not made based upon them...then no one saw the Project Manager fall in the forest.

View webinar on KPI Insight for Project Managers.