Full Sail Partners Blog (64)

Do you lose sleep at night wondering if you have the capacity to handle work coming in or even worse if you have too many people?  As a manager of a professional service firm, managing your human capital is a daily necessity to achieve firm growth and the anticipated performance expected from your employees.  As the market changes, your firm needs information readily available to make quick decisions about acquiring, training, and scheduling your talent.  Many firms rely on resource forecasting tools to handle the management of their employees.  Let’s take a further look at some of the challenges firms have with managing their resources: 

Challenge #1: What are my employees currently doing?  In the past, to see what an employee was working on, managers would go to the desk of their employees to check on the progress of their projects.  However, now resources aren’t always in the same office, state or even country.  Managers are finding they need to easily identify on a daily basis how their employees’ time is being used so they can plan for future work.

Solution - Collect and Measure Time.  As a professional service company – time is what we sell.  Sometimes there is a product that we deliver, but we still internally measure how valuable that product is based upon how much time we have spent creating it.  By capturing an employee’s actual time against a project your firm can now measure that time against what was forecasted to determine the variance. That variance provides you with data to use when projecting future projects.

Challenge #2: How do I match skills with available work?  Some firms are small enough that managers know everyone. However, for a larger firm or as a small firm grows, you don’t necessarily know the skills available within your firm.  Being able to match skills to the work you pursue and win becomes a juggling act.  Not all firms have the critical information available to predict when they need to hire an employee with specific skill sets.

Solution - Identify the Right Resource.  In an ERP, your firm identifies skills, training, role, and experience.  Having this information available allows project managers to identify the right resource based on real-time information.  An integrated solution provides your firm with the ability to search for similar past projects and determine how much experience (time data) they have working on this type of project.  The availability of this employee data allows project managers to make decisions about their collective skills and come up with a plan to increase / diversify their skills needed for the project.

Challenge #3: What predictions can I make about future work?  In order to make a well-informed decision on how to handle the future work, a firm needs historical data.  Without this information, you might as well turn over your resource forecasting to a psychic because your firm is just guessing.  Many firms don’t have the data available to make these decisions.

Solution - Availability.   Project schedules require managing all types of commitments – planned and unplanned. In addition to project commitments, employees take vacation, are on holiday leave, and have internal meetings and activities.  Developing a comprehensive plan for each employee provides accurate resource forecasting to handle future demands.  This helps identify capacity excess or shortage gaps.

The ultimate goal for any project is to end up with a loyal client that will use your firm again.  In order to do that, firms must finish the project on time and on budget.  Choosing a solution that integrates all of these data points allows your firm to report real-time information to make well-informed decisions about resource forecasting needs.  By optimizing your resources, project managers can shorten the decision cycle, increase profitability, and better plan for the future.  

Learn more about Resource Management?  

I was talking recently with a prospective client who observed that his firm had outgrown QuickBooks (QB). The conversation eventually led to a discussion of the advantages of ERP systems over back office accounting systems — which include not only efficiency gains, but strategic improvements as well. 

Being in the ERP implementation business, we hear a lot of customers express frustration over outgrowing QB, so I asked my prospect what it meant specifically for his firm. Off the top of his head, he named several pain points:

• First, their QB systems were disconnected, so there was no particular place where management could view financial performance overall, let alone broken out by project manager or client. 
• QB could display AR for a specific client, but offered little in the way of project information regarding specific services or deliverables. 
• Last but not least, correspondence for each client was buried in various public folders on the firm’s file server. To make matters worse, the correspondence trail was incomplete due to users’ not following the correspondence logging protocol. 

After hearing these insights, plenty of examples came to mind of ways that even a small- to mid-size firm like his could benefit from an ERP system. I mentioned a few of the most basic advantages of ERP systems over back office accounting: the value of integrated data, open architecture and user customizations.  

I also pointed out that thanks to the evolution of niche ERP systems, small firms CAN get the type of functionality that used to be available only to firms with deep pockets. In fact, it’s now quite easy to implement an ERP system that not only addresses the accounting function, but also facilitates the firm’s core processes and way of doing business. 

The Need For Visibility

My colleague next mentioned how his firm actually had strong AR, and good visibility into its cash and cash management. The problem, he said, was that the organization lacked the visibility needed to help back office management play a more significant role in decisions affecting the firm as a whole. By the same token, it was difficult to get project managers more involved in the fiscal responsibility that goes with managing client expectations. 

I pointed out that there were several other major advantages of ERP systems over basic accounting packages. The ERP concept excels at addressing the front end of the project life cycle, by facilitating tracking of projects and providing visibility. Specific examples include:

• Managing data obtained through the business development process
• Generating opportunity notifications and creating process flow through workflows and alerts to improve efficiencies and win rate
• Forecasting for opportunities and already-awarded projects regarding not only revenue, but staffing requirements as well
• Providing for audit trails of communication with clients, contacts and opportunities and supporting technical staff in the delivery of services under specific projects
• Facilitating communication with accounting early in the business development phase regarding terms, rates, related documents and specific contract requirements
• Integrating with desktop tools like Outlook, Word and PowerPoint to facilitate email communication and automate creation of proposal, estimating and contracting documents 

I then suggested we establish a value proposition for the level of investment that would be needed at this critical juncture in the firm’s transition from QuickBooks. This is where my prospect’s eyes started to get big, as he saw how much time, factored by associated hourly costs, was being spent on efforts that an ERP system could automate. 

We assessed values for each of the existing manual processes, and compared them with the reduced time and effort involved using the ERP approach. The resulting savings would go right to the firm’s bottom line. But as significant as those savings would be, I added, the real impact would come from the improved quality of the work environment, better communication with clients, and most importantly, increased opportunities for success. 

See how today’s success-minded firms require a laser-like focus on strong project and financial management practices by downloading the whitepaper on Growth and Transition Strategies.

Last week I was working on my plans for a few upcoming implementations (yes, I have to do plans just like you do).  As I was using the “Resource Search” feature, I thought it would be helpful to demonstrate some of the features of this powerful tool for fellow project managers.  So for those that are thinking about using Deltek Vision's Resource Planning tool and those that need a refresher, here are some great features of the tool.  

What Is Resource Search Option?
The Resource Search option allows you to see who is available to work and when they are available. It allows users to quickly assign resources and respond to client needs. This feature is accessed when working on the Labor Tab of the Planning module.  To search for resources, right click on the left side bar to search for a resource. Then select “Resource Search.”   

Who Has Skills?  
If you are like me, you are already familiar with your team’s skill set because we have a smaller team. Depending on the size of your firm, you may or may not need this feature. However, as your firm grows (that's the purpose of tool, right?) knowing the skills available can be very helpful. The resource search has the capability to search for resource skills. To take advantage of this feature, your organization must simply take the time to enter data within the Experience Tab. The skills feature is also used by marketing as a part of the government SF330 form. The skill and level of expertise is customizable to your firms needs.

Who is Available?  
In addition to searching for skills, the resource search allows you to identify resource availability and commitment. The commitment search allows me to search for over and under usage, as well as, a specific percentage of utilization for a specific date range. This feature in combination of the skills search allows me to narrow down the person that fits my criteria.

An Alternative to Resource Search
I noticed I kept switching back and forth from the Planning module to Resource Management.  Once I've narrowed down my search on the employees I'm looking for, I like to use the Resource Management module.  For me, the coloring provides a quick visual of those that are over, under, or on target for a specific time period.

To simplify this process, lets pull up the Resource Utilization screen in a separate window (Right Click on ‘Resource Utilization’, click ‘Open in New Window’).  Now by simply moving the plan to the left hand side and the Resource Utilization screen on the right hand side, I'm now able to show the available resources.  In the Deltek Vision ERP system, this side by side comparison provides a quick view of our team members availability next to our project plan. This is simple, easy and saves me at least 3 mouse clicks.

More Resources
Are your Project Managers using these tools?  Searching by skills, commitment, and availability are only a few of the features in Deltek Vision's project-based ERP.

Be sure to view our Resource Planning Demo to learn more.

For those using Deltek Vision Resource Planning, try out these tip and let me know how they work for you. If you have any tips and tricks you've learned, please add a comment.

Be sure to check other Project Management articles.

Of all the metrics that professional services firms can track, two of the most important are utilization and realization.  These are different, but related ways of measuring employee productivity and profitability. Both can be measured with a high degree of accuracy — and made visible to management — using software.

A quick jargon review

Utilization measures the hours charged to a client’s project compared to the total available hours (usually 40 hours per week). For example, if an employees’ expected work week is 40 hours and the employee achieves 35 hours of client chargeable work then their utilization rate is 87.5%.

Utilization is not necessarily within an employee’s control: for example, an employee might be working on an important internal project that can’t be billed. Because of the many variables that affect utilization, the longer the period over which it’s tracked — say, over the course of a year — the more useful it is in evaluating performance against employee and company goals.

The second metric, realization, refers to the actual revenue based on employees’ hours charged and billed to clients compared to what they should have generated from their utilization achieved. It’s a measure of their profitability, and a metric that provides valuable insight into how well a company is able to translate hours worked on projects into revenue. In a perfect world utilization and realization will be equal, but this is rarely the case.  Realization can also help in compensation and promotion reviews, staffing decisions, project and unit pricing and assessing the health of the company itself.

The impact of measuring employee productivity and profitability can be enhanced further by a commitment to Earned Value Management (EVM), a project management technique for objectively measuring project performance and progress. Together, these techniques help a firm gain a clear, objective view of employee and project performance, identify where resources are over- and under-utilized, and optimize workforce utilization and profitability.

Software solutions

There are a number of software solutions for measuring employee productivity and profitability. Some focus specifically on project and resource management, while others provide these functions as part of larger, more integrated solutions. 

For example, Deltek Vision can provide a firm with comprehensive visibility into its organization, efficient oversight of its projects and people, and efficient automation of processes. Most significantly, it allows the firm to be proactive rather than reactive in addressing resource management issues, thus increasing the probability of project success. On a more tactical level, the product’s Employee Realization feature allows a user to track and report on realization values, compare utilization vs. realization, optimize staff utilization, minimize scheduling conflict, and substantially reduce the potential for missed milestones. 

Whatever approach an organization uses in measuring employee productivity and profitability, doing so requires a sustained effort and commitment on the part of management. Handled correctly, however, the payoff is immense: instant visibility into resource commitments across an entire organization, and granular awareness of who is available (and when) with the skills needed to satisfy projects’ technical requirements.

Project delivery is all about taking an idea from concept through to production. Firms want their projects completed in the fastest and most cost-efficient manner possible, all without sacrificing quality. Incorporating feedback into a firm’s process helps the team perform at their best, while the very act of asking for feedback shows clients proactive and professional care. To help jumpstart your client feedback process, we’ve listed the top 10 feedback techniques to facilitate project delivery. 

1. Make it Comfortable.

When requesting feedback make sure the process is comfortable to use for all parties. The more comfortable the process, the more likely both parties are to participate. A comfortable process means clients will not feel put on the spot and concerned about a confrontation. Focus questions on processes, not personalities, and offer a flexible answer scale to capture subtle nuances of perceptions. 

2. Create Actionable Results.
An effective feedback technique requires data to enable follow-up. Be sure you are asking questions that allow you to retrieve measurable, actionable data. If the questions are too vague or too open ended, you won’t have the information that you need to take action.  

3. Process Focused.

The questions asked should be about process rather than people or products. We aren’t looking to find out how well the client “liked” us, but rather where our process is working great and where it might need some improvement.  

4. Go Beyond Satisfaction.

Ask your clients questions focused on their expectations, instead of their satisfaction, because satisfaction is the expected norm. The client’s perception of how you performed compared to their expectations is the key to knowing where to improve your project delivery process. Additionally, you’ll find 500% more exceptionally positive feedback than you will challenging feedback – and we all love to discover good news. 

5. Reduce Liability.

When asking for feedback, focus on questions that can reduce liability and encourage positive outcomes. Just by asking for feedback throughout a project, you are creating a record of the service perceptions all along the way, reducing the chance of a lawsuit and increasing your ability to meet their needs. Feedback helps keep you and your client aligned on a common goal - a successful project outcome. 

6. Don’t Wait.

Collect feedback throughout the project, not just at the end - when it’s too late to improve that project. Response rates are highest when the client senses his feedback might improve the project outcome. Once the project is over, the incentive to respond is gone. 

7. Make it Trackable.

Tracking feedback responses isn’t complicated, but making sure everyone on your team gets the feedback they need, reviews it, and takes appropriate action can be much more challenging. Deploy good tools to capture who is asking for feedback, who’s responding, and who takes what action on each critical response. 

8. Use Instant Alerts.

Collect feedback in a way that you can be instantly alerted to new feedback and drive real-time follow-up.  A good system will establish score thresholds that indicate, in real-time, when follow-up is required for exceptional circumstances. Make sure the right people are alerted so nothing falls through the cracks. 

9. Keep the Client First.

Structure your feedback techniques so that it is quick and easy for the client to give you feedback. Don’t waste their time with long surveys or questions with answers that only matter to you.  Response rates are higher with multiple short surveys over a period of time, than with one or two long surveys sent less frequently. 

10. Follow up.

Don’t neglect the follow up! A survey should always start a conversation, not replace one. Typically, follow-up is simply a personal acknowledgement that you saw and read the response. However, if any special situations were noted (either in scores or comments) be sure you open a dialogue to show how the feedback will change the process and project going forward. 

Each of these feedback techniques focus on a deliberate approach to your feedback collection efforts. Set your goals to collect actionable feedback in way that is easy for the client. Make understanding the results and following up easy for you too. See feedback as the opportunity that it is to improve your process, reduce your liability and become your client’s expert.

Interested in learning more about how you can start collecting client feedback?

Now that Spring has arrived, it is an excellent time to clean-up your database. Is your data clean, consistent, and accurate? Almost everyone you talk to would answer this question with an emphatic "NO" for one reason or another. Data is always degrading in any database you review because information is constantly changing. Contacts leave companies, projects progress, and opportunities move through the sales cycle.

Data integrity impacts our ability to determine business trends, success rate, and just know who and what to pursue. Misleading queries and inaccurate reports result in making wrong decisions when data is incomplete or incorrect. With an integrated ERP system everyone can help with the clean-up, but on the other hand they can sometimes add to the mess. So what do you need to keep in mind when tackling data clean-up?

Clean your dirty data by evaluating these four areas: decision points, standardization, automated clean-up, and dedicated resources.  Let’s walk through an example and apply each of these four areas to project data.

• Step 1 –  Decision Points: It is helpful to start by doing a search criteria to help make a decision. First, determine what fields need to be cleaned-up and what fields need to be evaluated so you can narrow down the list.  Maybe we want to update the project status to determine if it should be dormant, inactive, or active. Our first criteria could be to search all projects that are active to see how many we need to evaluate. Then we need to narrow the search. Depending on what information you can search, you could do a search on when the project was opened and/or if time has been billed in the past two months.  Understanding your decision points narrows down the list and reduces the number of projects that need to be evaluated.
• Step 2 – Standardization: Sometimes during the clean-up you realize there are fields or options that are not really needed. This is a great time to establish or re-establish corporate standards and expectations. Is everyone using the same definition? In our example, are you finding employees that are using inactive instead of dormant?  Adding tool tips can provide a definition to help users know how to update the field.
• Step 3 – Automated Clean-up: Now that you have gone through the exercise of cleaning up the information. Think about how you can update the information periodically or better yet provide an alert to you or employees when they should update the information. Is there a specific timeframe that the status should be evaluated? Workflows can help keep the data accurate. By identifying a trigger, a workflow could alert someone to review the information or even update the status to dormant based on lack of activity.
• Step 4 – Dedicated Resources: As the saying goes, the information is only as good as the data on which is based. So dedicate the necessary resources to clean it up and better yet, maintain the data. Setting up a quality control schedule and setting expectations helps keep the data clean and manageable.

Does your firm have dirty data? For a fresh clean feeling, take the time to establish your firm’s process to clean it up! By following these four steps, your firm will improve data integrity.

In keeping up with CRM related forums, someone asked about the best approach to handling and maintaining their CRM system.  It started to make me think about the value of what is communicated in these forums and how much people trust advice from others they believe to be their peers. It made me wonder why people instantly trust others that may or may not have all of the background information that top consulting firms discover when providing their services.  

In this situation, I observed people giving advice as opposed to just sharing experiences.  I found it curious that contributors to the forum assumed many of the variables the person inquiring had not provided and further, the person making the inquiry hoped to find solutions without providing any background or specifics.  

No two companies are alike. Sure there are similarities, but my experience in consulting has led me to believe that if you want a true solution to your issue, you have to take the time to identify the “who”, “what”, “where”, “when”, “why”, and “how” (wwwwwh) questions and the most important question, “What do you need?”.  As the forum conversation continued the inquirer thanked people for their input, but soon added more information as the responses were not really the direction they were looking for.  This occurred to me to somewhat frustrate many of the individuals that had already offered their “advice”.  One such comment was “well if you had told me that when you asked the question.” 

So What Happened?

When we ask a question, individuals drive off of their experience and what worked for them. However, they don’t necessarily provide context of why that worked for them and include those specific reasons. This poses a huge problem to the answers they receive. Many people go directly to wanting a solution without having any true understanding of the context of their question. When the basic “wwwww” are not qualified, the inquirer runs the risk of not addressing their true needs. Even some of the top consulting firms tend to take the same approach with their clients.  In fact earlier in my career I used the phrase, “when I was in industry, what worked for us was…”. 

So why do individuals seek a solution in these forums before building context and clearly defining what they need?  Here are a few thoughts I had on why this may occur:

1)     We seek good ideas from others in the same industry

2)     We crave solutions with little challenge

3)     We need immediate answers

4)     We love FREE advice!

Just like the advice provided by contributors in a forum, consultants sometimes fall into this pitfall of providing quick advice. In order to not challenge a client, consultants may diminish the level of anxiety to both their client and themselves by giving “a solution”.  As a consultant, ready-made solutions give a sense of accomplishment.  But sometimes that solution is short-term because the question asked is out of context of the bigger issue.  Because the question was asked in a vacuum (forum), there is little room for further qualifying discovery. 

Inquiring about what others in industry are doing and or have done allows one to know others experiences.  From this may come ideas that generate further inquiry, but the inquirer should look to put this further inquiry in context of their “wwwww” questions.  The key here is to be able to have these “wwwww” questions already established and to quickly hear the advice against what you already know.  The same preparation should be part of ones working relationship with the consultant. The difference is, one can dynamically interact with a consultant and establish the context.

So an important distinction the next time one works with a consultant: if the consultant is not looking to build the context of your issue, they likely are going to only provide short-term solutions that do not fit well in the long run with your company’s needs. 

Do you have any stories to share about a consultant that applied the “wwwwwh” principals that allowed you to develop a true solution and avoid thinking short-term? Share in our comments section below. 

SaaS, ERP, CRM, LOL blah, blah, blah. Today everything seems to be reduced down to acronyms, to fit into our fast paced instant message, text, and Twitter world.  However, many times we can be left out of the story because we don’t know what they mean.  So, what does ERP mean and what are some of the common related terms? To help you decipher this business jargon, let’s discuss what it is and how it can help firms.

ERP – Enterprise Resource Planning is a system facilitating the flow of information between all business functions, from your Finance and Management Accounting to Project management, Client Relationship Management (CRM – see more below), Human Resources, Inventory and Purchasing. 

The benefit of an ERP is your business efficiency can improve dramatically as all your business processes are automatically synchronized.  The real-time functionality allows for upper management to react quickly to changing dynamics in the company and the economy. 

Some of the characteristics to look for in a “good” ERP solution are:

• Operates in “Real-Time”, reflecting what is going on with your business now
• Database that supports all applications and allows for minimal duplication of efforts
• Consistent interface throughout the system for ease in training staff

SaaS – Software as a Service is a software model where the software and data are centrally located on the “cloud” (see below).  SaaS solutions are typically accessed via a web browser allowing access from any location.  SaaS solutions have become popular over the last several years.

Some of the benefits of a SasS model are:

• Easier administration at the client level as all updates, and patches are handled by the provider on a timely basis
• Management of the data back-ups
• Subscription feel providing a lower up-front investment compared to traditional software models

CRM - Customer Relationship Management is a model for managing a company’s interactions with current and future customers.  A typical CRM system will synchronize sales, marketing, customer service and technical support (if applicable).

Some benefits of a CRM system are:

• Identification of top clients allowing for better customer service focus
• Increasing information sharing between employees
• Allowing systems to track client contacts
• Providing visibility into sales and marketing efforts

SQL – Structured Query Language is a programming language that allows access to and management of large amounts of data. The data is stored in a relational database and offers the user the ability to manipulate and view the data in various ways. Efficiency is the main benefit of a relational database as the data can be easily formatted providing ease of grouping and comparison.

Cloud refers to using the internet to access programs and data.  Operating in the cloud has some real advantages in that you can access your data anywhere at any time and the cost of maintaining local hardware and operating systems are reduced (somewhat replaced by the cost of the cloud operations).  Some concerns are ensuring data integrity and security, reliability, limited customization and latency.  Be sure to check out this whitepaper for more information about the cloud.

Project-Based ERP is an ERP system built to meet the needs of project-based industries.  Project-based industries generate most of their business via individual projects (as opposed to producing widgets).  A project-based ERP will allow managers to track the life-cycle of individual projects from the initial proposal through project close-out.  This allows management analysis of the success (or challenges) of individual efforts, apply best practices and come up with a company policies and procedures.

Open Architecture refers to the ability to add-on, customize or upgrade components of existing system software.  Software that has open architecture publishes or makes available its structure allowing for developers to access and manipulate.  In some cases this allows direct access via an OBDC (yet another acronym meaning Open Database Connectivity) connection or information sharing via an API (Application Programming Interface). 

Of course this is only a snapshot of what you hear out there. Hopefully it will serve as a starting point so you expand your research ERP.  New terms are created daily (just check any 15 year olds text messages to see) so this may be obsolete by the time it is published.  However, it does help you get a handle on the terms you have heard on the news, business reports, and around the office.  And now when someone asks you ‘What does ERP mean,’ you’ll have the answer!