Full Sail Partners Blog (35)

Firms in the professional services industry often have a difficult time managing the large volumes of information that come with each project. Having access to all project information from emails to drawings to contracts is important and vital for effective project management. With information silos, disorganized yellow folders and different systems per team, there is a greater chance for a less than successful outcome on firm projects. Deltek Project Information Management, or PIM, changes the way professional services firms manage information.

PIM Challenges the Norm

Many professional services firms believe that using yellow folders to store project documentation is the best option. While they are certainly easy to create, these folder structures offer no options for controlling access to the most up to date project information. Critical project data can easily be missed, and uninformed decisions can be made without a central place to view all current documents like offered with PIM. 

Email Communication is Valuable Information

One of the biggest mistakes that project-based businesses make is not considering email communication valuable project information. Emails and their attachments have significant details that help keep track of the project progression. Issues crop up in email correspondence that are essential for project members to see. For the project to run smoothly, these emails must be stored appropriately as PIM provides. 

Benefits of Using Deltek PIM 

• Organized project files improve efficiency – Users can store, manage, retrieve and share documents in a central hub
• Better collaboration – Project communication is improved when all team members can see all the relevant information
• Quickly find critical data – All key project information is available to monitor project progress and make better decisions
• Protecting the firm – Risk can be reduced with greater visibility into project data
• Mobile connection – Enables on-the-go field work where photos can be taken, or drawings can be viewed on site
• Integration with Deltek ERP– Every critical piece of project information is in one location to manage budgets, schedules and resources for every project in Deltek 

Goodbye Yellow Folders, Hello Deltek PIM 

Deltek PIM offers a cohesive information management system which ensures that the correct knowledge is always available to all project team members. By implementing PIM, professional services firms can store, catalog and retrieve all essential project management documents from one place. If your firm is still managing project information using yellow folders or keeping information silos, the best decisions are not being made. PIM can help make better ones.

Full Sail Partners, a Concur and Deltek Platinum Partner, is excited to announce that Joel Slater has joined the firm as Product Sales Manager. In this newly created role, he will oversee all Full Sail Partners’ product sales. The firm’s product offerings include Deltek Vision, Deltek for Professional Services and Blackbox Connector solutions which integrate multiple best of breed software applications like Entrinsik Informer 5 business intelligence and Concur Expense and Invoice.

Joel comes to Full Sail Partners with more than ten years of experience selling ERP and finance-related software applications to project-based firms. Also, having been a Sales Executive for both Concur and Deltek, Joel has ample knowledge of Full Sail Partners’ product offerings. With this exceptional background, he will be able to ensure Full Sail Partners’ clients are provided with the right tools within their stated budget to help them streamline their operations. 

“I’m excited to continue my career working with project-oriented firms, and with a continued focus on a product set which I truly believe in,” stated Joel Slater. “This new role provides an ideal setting for utilizing my past experience to help our clients advance successfully into the future.” 

As Product Sales Manager, Joel will work with clients directly on any Full Sail Partners’ product offering, but he will also be available to assist the account management and the Blackbox Connector sales teams. Our account management and Blackbox Connector sales teams are located across the country allowing us to provide better service to clients throughout the United States. Joel will be a great asset in working with them to offer the solution that best fits the individual client’s needs.   

“Joel is a highly-regarded sales person in the Deltek and Concur ecosystem. We are thrilled to have him join the Full Sail Partners’ team as our new Product Sales Manager,” stated Sarah Gonnella, VP of Marketing & Sales. “In addition to his strong selling background, Joel is known for mentoring other sales colleagues. As a growing sales group, this is vital to our firm’s success and we look forward to his knowledge and expertise to grow the company.”

For more information, please contact Full Sail Partners’ Marketing and Communications Department. 

Change is inevitable but planning for change can certainly alleviate its impact. If you’re the owner or leader of a professional services firm, you know that senior level personnel are eventually going to retire or might simply move on to new challenges. With this in mind, your firm can be prepared by having a succession plan in place for when employees leave.

What is Succession Planning?

Stated simply, succession planning is the process whereby an organization ensures that all key roles can be replaced by competent new employees. As part of the succession plan, employees that are going to eventually fill these high-level vacancies will participate in a training and mentoring program to prepare them to become future firm leaders. The succession plan should also include replacing lower level employees as they move to higher positions within the firm.  

The succession plan should be presented to employees as a professional development and training opportunity. It should provide a map to employees on where the firm believes their individual skills will benefit the organization in the future. In an effort to plan for staff leaving, the process actually encourages retention of other high-quality employees.

Developing a Succession Plan

Creating a succession plan requires firm leaders to take a hard and honest look at their current financial situation and where they predict themselves to be in the future. Additionally, they will need to determine when certain employees will retire, and which employees are appropriate to develop as future replacements. Each role no matter where it is in the firm will require a different training program that includes a mix of activities to ensure the skills required to be successful are learned in advance of any departure.

Common Challenges of a Quality Succession Plan

Creating and maintaining a quality succession plan is challenging. Here are some common issues firms face with succession planning that must be considered:

• Smaller firms have fewer positions which makes it difficult for advancement
• Tapped succession employees may leave for better salaries at other firms
• Project-based firms can experience ups and downs to the number of contracts/jobs they manage and deliver which affects staffing
• Senior leaders may stay in their position rather than leave when planned
• Chosen succession employees may lack motivation to advance
• Plan falters due to poor communication or the lack of clear development and training taking place

Investing into the Future of Your Firm

A succession plan is an investment into the future of your firm. The time and effort required for a successful succession plan is costly, but the plan can also create future savings. Having a great succession plan in place will encourage retention since employees will feel valued, but it will also prevent the negative impact of change if someone unexpectedly leaves.

Full Sail Partners, a Concur and Deltek Platinum Partner, is pleased to announce that Amy Balassone has been promoted to Relationship Manager. As Relationship Manager, she will focus on cultivating new clients through referrals, building relationships with existing clients, promoting brand awareness of the Blackbox Connector and demonstrating measurable business results for clients. In her new role, Amy is responsible for managing more than 100 relationships with Concur representatives and coordinating efforts with prospective clients.

Formerly serving as a Direct Marketing Associate, Amy has been part of the marketing and business development team at Full Sail Partners for almost 3 years. During this time, she has gained an in-depth knowledge of the products Full Sail Partners offers and helped to solve common problems our clients face. Prior to joining Full Sail Partners, Amy worked as a program liaison to healthcare providers working directly with clients to ensure cost effective outcomes. 

“I have such a customer-focused mentality. I am very excited that in my new position I get the chance to continue building relationships with clients while offering a larger variety of products and services to meet their needs,” noted Amy Balassone. 

With the continued growth of Full Sail Partners’ Blackbox Connector offerings to include the business intelligence tool Entrinsik Informer 5, in addition to Concur, the firm needed a key person to help clients with these specific solutions. Firms interested in connecting Deltek Vision or Deltek for Professional Services to Concur Expense and Invoice or to Informer 5 now have a point of contact in Amy. 

“Amy has demonstrated a willingness to continuously grow and learn. We are so excited to promote Amy to Relationship Manager working with our Blackbox Connector team and helping clients gain insight into our ever-growing portfolio of solutions. With Amy’s excellent customer service, clients will now have a great resource in Amy,” stated Sarah Gonnella, VP of Marketing and Sales.

For more information, please contact Full Sail Partners’ Marketing and Communications Department. 

Full Sail Partners, a Deltek Platinum Partner, is excited to announce that it has been recognized by Accounting Today on the top 100 VAR list for 2018. Every year Accounting Today picks the top value-added resellers (VARs) of accounting software, and Full Sail Partners has been ranked in the top 100 again this year. In fact, it has increased in ranking by ten, which is a 25-position increase over the last two years.  

Each year a select group of 100 organizations are honored for their accomplishments as VARs. The top VARs are chosen from firms focused on sales and implementation of accounting and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. Criteria used to determine the winners include 2017 revenue, number of offices, and staff size.

“Just four years ago we were listed as one of the VARs to watch and returned to the list in 2015. Each year since then we keep leaping up the rankings. We are thrilled to continually move up on Accounting Today’s VAR 100 list,” stated Sarah Gonnella, VP of Marketing & Sales at Full Sail Partners. “As Deltek end-users too, we share our clients’ desires of wanting a robust project-based ERP system like Deltek offers with the flexibility to choose other best of breed solutions to help automate end-to-end processes. This provides us a unique perspective that many VARs do not have. With the creation of our Blackbox Connector we are bringing data together and streamlining the integration process.”

Accounting Today’s VAR 100 also indicated that a cloud offering is a must for VAR clients, and these clients are actively seeking higher-level capabilities from their technology. They are asking for analytics, intelligence and automation. Conveniently, Full Sail Partners has positioned itself to respond to these exact needs. With its Blackbox Connector capabilities and emerging business intelligence offerings, Full Sail Partners intends to keep developing solutions to fit client growth and desires.

Here is the full 2018 VAR list: https://www.accountingtoday.com/the-2018-var-100

Accounting Today is a leading provider of online business news for the accounting community, offering breaking news, in-depth features, and a host of resources and services. The VAR 100 list is an annual report developed to rank the top technology resellers in the accounting and ERP spaces.  

For more information, please contact Full Sail Partners’ Marketing and Communications Department. 

Almost all businesses utilize key performance indicators (KPIs) to identify trends and to measure performance against set goals. KPIs can fall into one of two categories: drivers and outcomes. Drivers measure current and future activity whereas outcomes measure the success of past activity. Furthermore, powerful KPIs should have some key characteristics to ensure they are clear and easily measurable.

Characteristics of Powerful Key Performance Indicators

1. Simple – KPIs should be simple to understand and to measure. It is extremely important that employees know what a KPI is measuring and how it is being calculated. KPIs should also be concise so that are manageable and do not overwhelm employees with too much information.
2. Relevant – KPIs need to be relevant to the organization. This can be done by making the KPIs for employees relate to the strategic goals and objectives of the company.
3. Measurable – Employees need to be able to analyze their performance which is the goal of using KPIs. Therefore, KPIs must be measurable but not all will have a quantitative goal.
4. Actionable – KPIs should prompt decisions and not create more questions. In other words, KPIs cannot be effective if employees are unsure of what to do with the information.
5. Timely – KPIs should be reported frequently enough to allow employees to make timely decisions. However, avoid having the reporting too frequent as this can overwhelm employees with too much information.
6. Visible – KPIs should be visible across the entire organization. This allows employees to see how their work is helping achieve the goals of the entire organization. It also provides incentives to employees to work harder and be more productive.

Using Key Performance Indicators to Drive Success

For a business to be successful, it must have goals it wants to achieve. These goals are a way to measure the performance of the company and its employees. Lastly and most importantly, a KPI is useless if the objective and the result cannot be reported on. Thus, KPIs must be meaningful to be powerful.

For professional services firms, having the right project lifecycle is essential to having a profitable company. Even more, the processes that drive your firm’s project lifecycle must be in sync with the systems you use to manage them. There are several stages in the project lifecycle and evaluating your processes requires breaking down the steps. In this blog, we’ll look at the initial and most overlooked phase of the project lifecycle…winning the work.

Leads and Opportunities

Here’s where many firms go wrong when examining their project lifecycle…to start a project, you must first win the job. So, evaluating the lead to opportunity process is an essential component and must be considered in the project lifecycle.

When a new lead is acquired, it needs to be captured in a system that provides visibility to the entire company. As a business development person learns more information from the lead, it is input into the system and analyzed to see if the firm can meet the requirements to win the project. Once the decision is made that your firm can win the work then the lead becomes an opportunity.

If you are using Deltek Vision or Deltek for Professional Services (DPS), it is recommended that you create a “proposal project” to track the time to prepare the proposal. By using a proposal project, your firm will have the analytics regarding the cost of winning and losing work as well as the total cost of the business development efforts.

Fee Proposal Development

Developing the fee proposal is another important step to the business development portion of the project lifecycle. The fee proposal will eventually become the basis for the project budget. It will include what your firm is being paid for the various stages of the project. This may also include bonuses or penalties for meeting or failing to meet certain milestones.

It is recommended for Deltek Vision and DPS users to develop the fee proposal using the resource planning module. This will allow you to incorporate previous performance from similar projects to ensure you are charging the right amounts and including the correct milestones. Additionally, firms should continuously check the scope of work and make sure it’s in line with the fee proposal you are developing.

Fee Negotiation and Finalizing a Budget

Once the client indicates it has a desire to move forward with your firm, the fee negotiation and budget finalization phase of the project lifecycle begins. Things to keep in mind during this stage are possible changes to scope, schedule and fees. The budget created during this process will serve as the guide for the project manager to execute the work.

Next Steps to the Project Lifecycle

This blog discussed the business development piece of the project lifecycle. Remember that periodic reviews of your firm’s project lifecycle are a must to ensure that the process is still in line with how your firm has evolved. Stay tuned for more blogs about project execution and project closeout.

On May 28^th, 2014 the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) jointly issued the Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) 606, Revenue from Contracts with Customers. At the end of 2018, the way professional services firms recognize revenue from contracts with customers will be significantly impacted. ASC 606 will require firms to recognize revenue when goods or services are transferred to the customer in an amount that is equivalent to the goods or services delivered at that point. Let’s break this down into layman’s terms.

Basics to Revenue Recognition

The revenue recognition principle is an accounting guideline that requires revenue to be shown on the income statement in the period in which it is earned and not in the period when payment is collected. Furthermore, payment can be received prior to or after the delivery of a good or service, but the income statement must reflect the payment for the period in which it was billed. This is part of the accrual accounting basis as opposed to cash basis of accounting.

Impacts of FASB ASC 606

When FASB ASC 606 rolls out, professional services firms that are subject to audit will be required to apply this new standard. The new guideline establishes a five-step process to govern contract revenue reporting:

1. Identify contract(s) with a customer
2. Identify performance milestones in the contract
3. Determine the transaction price
4. Allocate the transaction price to the performance milestones
5. Recognize revenue when the performance milestone has been met

Additionally, if a professional services firm is still utilizing an outdated accounting system or an internally created system, these systems may not be capable of supporting the ASC 606 guideline.

Using the Right Accounting System for ASC 606

Fortunately, Deltek Vision and Deltek for Professional Services users have the right system to accommodate the changes brought on by ASC 606. Since these are project-based ERPs, revenue generation is easily recognized by using the project management tools that are part of these systems. As a result, firms can recognize revenue when milestones are achieved. This is done by using basic revenue generation factors like:

• Job to date spent
• Percentage of completion
• Milestones or deliverables being met

Get Your Firm Ready for ASC 606

Good news! Your firm still has time to prepare for these changes. In most cases, applying the five steps mentioned above will bring your firm into compliance. However, these steps may not apply to all your contracts or for all professional services firms. If you are unsure if your firm is compliant, reach out to Full Sail Partners for more information.

Annual review time is often seen by many employees as a stressor. For even the most productive employee, the question of what hasn’t been said until this one point in the year causes concern. From the manager’s perspective, how is it even possible to clearly remember a year’s worth of employee performance? It makes much more sense to offer feedback consistently throughout the year. Let’s take a closer look at the value of continuous employee feedback especially for project-based firms.

Employee Engagement

With continuous employee feedback, managers can initiate employee engagement which leads to further discussions. The more opinions and ideas that are gathered will ultimately improve the project and ensure that it is done efficiently and on budget. If issues crop up, as they often do, engaging employees frequently will allow for proactive problem resolution instead of reactive analysis down the road. 

Good Balance

Keeping a balance between positive and negative feedback is another benefit of continuous employee feedback. While an employee’s performance may have to be corrected over some issue during a project, other things that have been done well can be provided to offer encouragement. This way, employees are still motivated to do their best work and don’t react negatively to the one matter that needed improvement.

Actionable Feedback

Continuous feedback provides actionable items that are mutually beneficial to managers and employees. Freshly addressing the situation at hand allows managers to respond and employees to correct immediately rather than reacting to what has already transpired and cannot be changed. Employees can also be given proper training to improve their efficiency and the outcome of the project. 

Goal Setting

Talking regularly about performance allows employees to set goals for themselves. When employees see how they are contributing to a project and know they will be a part of the positive outcome, they are inspired to perform better than before. Goal setting benefits managers and employees alike. 

Learn from Feedback

Offering continuous feedback is a way for employees to learn, grow and develop. It is a much better strategy for project-based businesses than annual performance reviews. Consistent feedback encourages conversations, goal mastery and efficiently run projects which is a win for everyone in your firm.

Many Deltek Vision users are unaware of the vast capabilities of workflows. From managing repetitive tasks to ensuring information is updated, workflows are extremely versatile and easy to setup. Let’s take a look at some Vision CRM workflows.

Workflow Examples for Deltek Vision CRM Users

Contacts - Track companies where your contacts have previously worked and automatically update a user defined grid when the Client field is changed on the contact record allowing information to stay up-to-date.

Marketing Campaigns – Automatically add predefined activities for Marketing Campaign follow-ups to ensure follow-through on your marketing efforts.

Opportunities – Make sure the business development team is following up on opportunities by creating Actions and Alerts that are prompted when an Opportunity is opened, a stage is changed and when the Opportunity is closed.

Warning Notifications - Give a gentle reminder to fill in a field value using a workflow to display a warning message. When a user changes the value of one field, a workflow can trigger a warning to indicate another field requires more information only when a specific value is chosen.

Error Notification - Use a workflow to display an error message instead of making all fields required. When a user changes the value of one field, a workflow can trigger an error message requiring an update to another field before being able to save when a specific value is chosen.

Contact Record Verification - Provide employees further insight on the validity of contact information by creating a workflow using custom fields. Employees simply check a checkbox, and through a workflow, the modified user and the date the checkbox was checked can populate reducing the number of fields the end user has to fill in.

Let Deltek Vision Workflows Work for You

These are just a few examples of things you can do with CRM workflows in Deltek Vision. Setting these workflows up is actually easier than you think and will save you and your firm lots of time. Checkout “Navigating Workflows: Standard and Advanced” and “Oh the Places You Can Go with Workflows, Alerts, and Stored Procedures” to learn more about workflows!