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At the core of a project-based firm’s business is the need to monitor the progress of your projects. As Project Manager’s we are busy and we need quick, real-time information to help us steer our projects. Just as a dashboard in a boat identifies and provides feedback regarding the status of our voyage – the speed, the wind angle, the wind force, and the navigational direction – a dashboard can provide the same information about your project.

Specifically, a project KPI dashboard can examine some simple indicators that allow a project manager to gauge which project(s) need more attention.  They should be examined on a regular basis. 

What Project KPIs should I be looking at?

• Accounts Receivable - Overdue AR can be a warning sign for many problems including:  client dissatisfaction, overall project communication issues, and client insolvency (they can’t pay us if they have no money. . . should we be loaning them more money?).  Make sure your AR is in line with a Summary AR Dashboard Part and one for each individual project.  We recommend examining this Project KPI at least twice every billing cycle.

 Tip to Think About:  What is my outstanding AR?  Not only the amount, but how many days out is it? 

• Unbilled Labor – A large amount of unbilled labor is a serious risk not only to the project, but to general firm cash flow.  The company cannot get paid for it if it doesn’t get billed.  A Project Manager should monitor this Project KPI closely all the time, but especially after invoicing.  Make sure to avoid carrying large amounts of unbilled labor from billing cycle to billing cycle.

Tip to Think About:  How much labor is sitting on my project that has not been marked as billed?  In other words, have I been billing my project progress correctly?  

• Estimated to Complete (ETC) and/or Estimate at Completion (EAC) – These schedule based measures will help you determine not only if you are on budget, but if you will finish the project within the overall budget as well.  Compare the EAC to the overall budget and if it is greater, you may decide to either reduce future expenditures or accept the fact that you going to be over budget. 

 Tip to Think About:  How much more do I need to finish this Project?
 When over  budget, confirm that you didn’t forget to send out additional services  contracts. 

• Summary Key Performance Indicators - Above the project level, the measures are usually about Net Revenue, Utilization and Backlog.  By putting these Project KPIs on your Dashboard, you can improve your performance and make your boss look good too.

Tip to Think About:  What is your Boss being measured on?  How can you manage your   projects better with the use of Project KPIs to improve those Summary Key Performance   Indicators?

There may be other metrics your firm utilizes.  Share with us what you have on your project KPI dashboard.  Also, be sure to check out our past webinar: Get the Work Done.

There are shelves and shelves full of books — actually, entire libraries — that offer insights into business process management. There is a simple reason for this: it’s one of the most fundamental and effective ways to improve firm growth. 

So what areas are involved in a business process evaluation? At a very high level, it’s about answering the big questions needed to effectively guide your firm, such as: 

• Are business objectives appropriate?
• Are key policies and plans effective?
• Do results validate business strategy?

At a more granular level, this type of inquiry involves examining existing business processes to find pain points, bottlenecks and inefficiencies that could be improved. In this regard, it’s a process that every business can benefit from — but especially firms that are project-based, such as professional services firms. For these types of companies, the exercise can point to solutions for: 

• Streamlining business processes, minimizing redundancy and saving money
• Gaining insight into operational metrics you can’t currently see — such as work backlog, etc.
• Making better decisions on uses of internal resources, based on up-to-the-minute data

Choices in Approach

How you conduct this type of self-examination depends on your goals, resources and desired return on expense/effort. For example, it could be highly focused, with internal staff looking at one particular process in one section of your organization. Or it could involve examining complex processes spanning several separate parts of the organization, which might require using an external consultant. 

When Full Sail Partners begins any new engagement with a client, we typically start with a business process evaluation. Generally this involves understanding our client’s various front and back office processes — potentially, all processes along the project lifecycle, including: 

• Business development tracking
• Estimating and business capture
• Project management and project profitability
• Employee utilization and realization
• Billing, A/R and firm financial reporting
• TQM

To appreciate the impact of a business process evaluation, consider the case of one of our clients, Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates (WJE), a 500-person firm based in Northbrook, Illinois. Along with the client’s initial concerns, our evaluation identified an inefficient paper-based process for initiating new projects that required anywhere from several hours to several days per project. Following our business process evaluation and implementation of a paperless process, (among other improvements), the client was able to reduce the required time to a few minutes per project. That efficiency gain, multiplied by the approximately 7,000 projects that WJE handles each year, resulted in $1.8 million annual savings, according to WJE’s Controller. 

There are other potential gains of a business process evaluation that are not directly tied to process efficiencies. For example, it can provide visibility to timely and accurate data that helps leadership make better business decisions. This was an additional gain from the project at WJE; principals were able to see clearly the potential conflicts of servicing a new client, allowing them to forego business development expenses and effort on a client that could not be serviced. 

Another example is gaining visibility into an organization’s work backlog — knowing exactly how much work is in the pipeline, and even more importantly, whether one has the staff on hand to do the work (and if not, specifically what type of staff are needed to fill the gaps). As a result, a firm can make better decisions about whom to hire (and when), and which projects to pursue. 

Evaluating ways to improve efficiency and effectiveness is an essential part of guiding an enterprise. Whether it’s performed internally in a very focused way, on a broader level by an external firm, or somewhere in between, it has the potential of allowing you to reexamine and reengineer your standard operating procedures and in turn, drive greater efficiency and visibility. Both capabilities are critical to consistently delivering value to your clients — and increasing profitability and firm growth.

Interested in a business process evaluation? Contact us to begin the process.

One of the most essential tools in project management is a Work Breakdown Structure, or WBS. The primary function of a WBS is to subdivide a project into more manageable components in terms of size, duration, and responsibility. By breaking a project down into smaller pieces it’s also easier to:

• Set measurable milestones for the project, and identify deliverables at the end of each phase that match up to the scope
• Allocate resources, complete scheduling and budgeting, manage procurement, maintain quality control, and manage risk
• Increase accountability by assigning individual responsibilities for each phase and task
• Know where you stand in terms of the total project (for example, are you 10% through the whole project, but 50% through the first phase?)

In short, the Work Breakdown Structure defines how you estimate, manage, and bill the project — and as a result, creating one should be priority one for every project.

Key design principles for an effective WBS

1. Account for 100% (no more, no less). One of the most important principles is that the WBS must include 100% of the work as defined by the project scope. It must also capture all internal, external, and interim deliverables, including project management, among the work to be completed. The rule applies at all levels within the hierarchy: the sum of the work at the most detailed level must equal 100% of the work represented by the combined total of the categories at the highest level. Another aspect of the rule is that the WBS should not include any work that is outside the actual scope of the project. 

2. Be mutually exclusive. There should be no overlap between two elements of a WBS in scope definition. Such an overlap could not only result in duplicated work or misunderstanding about responsibility and/or authority, but could also cause confusion in project cost accounting. One technique for avoiding this problem is to develop a WBS dictionary to clarify the differences between WBS elements and describe each in terms of milestones, deliverables, activities, scope, and other factors. 

3. Focus on outcomes, not actions. The best way to stick to the 100% rule is to define Work Breakdown Structure elements in terms of outcomes, as opposed to actions. This strategy ensures that the WBS is not overly prescriptive in terms of method, and therefore allows for more flexibility and creative thinking on the part of team members. In addition, a WBS that subdivides work by project phases (e.g. preliminary design phase, critical design phase, etc.) must clearly separate the phases by deliverables that define the entry and exit criteria (e.g. an approved preliminary or critical design review). 

4. Be detailed, but not too detailed. As useful as it is to divide work into smaller and more manageable elements, you also need to know when to stop. There are several ‘rules of thumb’ for determining appropriate activities or group of activities needed to produce a specific deliverable as defined by the WBS. The first is the “80 hour rule,” which cautions that no one activity or group of activities to produce a single deliverable should require more than 80 hours of effort. A second guideline is that no single activity or series of activities should take longer to complete than a reporting period. So, if your project team reports on its progress monthly, then no single activity or series of activities should be longer than one month long. 

5. Keep it simple. Creating three levels in your WBS hierarchy (e.g., Project, Phase and Task) should be enough. Avoid identifying labor or activity codes as WBS elements, even if you use them to describe labor detail on billing invoices or backup reports. In addition, it’s not necessary to make every phase balanced; just because one phase has a task doesn’t mean that all should.

Work Breakdown Structure: a blueprint for project management

When finished, a well-organized WBS resembles a flowchart in which every element is logically connected to another. The primary requirement or objective appears at the top, with increasingly specific elements appearing beneath it. The elements at the bottom of the diagram represent tasks and activities small enough to be easily understood and carried out. An effective WBS avoids redundancy, but at the same time, leaves out no critical elements. 

The bottom line is that a Work Breakdown Structure divides your project into distinct, manageable work elements. A WBS is useful to various groups within a company, including marketing, business development, accounting, and project management. A well-planned WBS is integral to successful project proposals, planning, scheduling, budgeting, and reporting.

Ready to learn more? Discover how an ERP system can benefit your firm by downloading our whitepaper.

Photo credit: http://virtualpminabox.com/

In today’s day and age of fast changing technology, firms must stay abreast of all available solutions to better compete with competition, and win work. Since the ‘great recession’ of 2009, competition on winning work has increased exponentially. Successful firms have combated this increased competition by staying current with technology, and using well thought out techniques to win projects. Included below are five tips that will help your firm better impress clients, and ultimately win more work.

1. Collaboratively share information with your project team. When responding to a client request / RFP, sharing data can become a cumbersome task in itself when working with remote teaming partners or staff. Often, the ability to seamlessly coordinate tasks/assignments, or share large files amongst your team can be the difference in winning or losing the work. To avoid these types of hiccups, leverage collaborative sharing tools such as Deltek Kona to keep your project team on the same page. Deltek Kona allows users to share files, and schedule important dates, seamlessly as though the users were all working in the same centralized office. You will be amazed at how Kona will empower your project team!
    
2. Hasten your proposals process through the use of templates. Unfortunately, many times firms will find out a about a project that they are a perfect fit for days before the due date. These time restrictions can ensnare the proposal process and make it difficult to respond sufficiently. Empower your marketing/business development department by creating templates that will allow you to export your information from Deltek Vision CRM to Microsoft Word or InDesign. This will allow you to streamline the proposal process, and concentrate on the areas of the proposal that require custom attention.
    
3. Avoid boring old PowerPoint presentation. Many firms make it to the short-list process only to utterly disappoint the client through the use of a boring, stale PowerPoint presentation. If you are unable to separate yourself from your competition, you are not doing your best to win projects. PowerPoint has been around since the late 1990’s, and sadly a large majority of presentations look like they came out of that same era. By using presentation software such as Prezi or PreZentit, your firm can immediately stand apart from your competition. With that said, don’t forget the importance of impressing the client by being personable and demonstrating your understanding the project. Overly relying on the use of presentation software is one of the quickest ways to lose a client’s attention.
    
4. Use a CRM solution to track relationships. We have all heard the saying, “It’s not what you know, but who you know!” This begs the question; does your firm know who it knows? If you are not tracking your relationships through CRM software such as Deltek Vision, then you are simply throwing darts at a board, blindfolded. A CRM solution will allow you to track who you know, recent conversations, and other important relationship data such as birthdays or anniversaries. This type of knowledge insight is important for creating meaningful relationships between your company, and your clients.
    
5. Optimize information for smart devices. If you own a smart device, and you have not optimized your marketing contact the device, you are not working smart! You never know when, or where, you might bump in to a perspective client. If you are unable to demonstrate your firms expertise at the drop of a hat, expect to lose out on a lot of potential work. Your firms website should be optimized for smart devices (iPhones, Androids, Tablets, Everything!) allowing you to be ready to show off how great your firm is, at a moment’s notice! In addition to optimizing your website for these smart devices, take the initiative to pre-load content on to your smart phone, in case you are unable to get internet service! By doing this, you will not only impress the client with all of your great works, but you will also demonstrate your ability to think ahead and be ready for the unexpected.
   
   If your firm is utilizing Deltek Vision CRM, make sure to check out Vision Unleashed. Vision Unleashed will allow you to access your full Vision system on teh go, from a mobile device. It also allows MAC users to access Vision without the need for running parallels or bootcamp. This allows MAC users to utilize their workstation to it maximum potential without dedicating resources to addition process just to access Vision!

I hope you learned something from this blog. Some of these technologies or techniques might seem obvious, but unfortunately many times it’s the obvious omissions that cause us to lose out on winning new work. If you use any of the concepts highlighted in this blog, make sure to comment below and let us know. We love to hear success stories!

Once you win your next project, make sure to review these project management concepts.

If your business designs and produces projects for external clients, you’re in what is referred to as a project-based firm. This category can include architecture, engineering and construction companies, consulting firms, advertising agencies and many others.

As different as these industries may be from one another, they share a core challenge of completing projects in ways that meet the client’s goals within existing constraints, while at the same time, delivering the desired profitability to their organizations.

There are many tools and methodologies that can help project managers at project-based firms track how successfully they deliver projects. But before managers can benefit from such tools and methodologies, it’s essential for them to understand four basic project management concepts, and how they interrelate.

1. Resources – The most critical resources that your organization manages are its human capital, which, depending on your needs and preferences, you might track as individuals, teams or both. Resources can also include equipment, services, supplies, and funds. A central goal in managing resources is ensuring the suitability of the specific resources, as well as availability, internal costs, etc.

2. Time – Managing time involves organizing and tracking tasks, activities, and schedules. It’s critical in helping to establish a workable plan and schedule, monitoring and reporting on progress, and ultimately, ensuring the profitability of the project. Key aspects include defining and sequencing activities, estimating needed resources and time requirements, and developing and managing to a defined schedule.

3. Cost – Effective cost management begins before the project even gets underway, by planning a budget with as much accuracy and specificity as possible. Cost management also requires developing contingencies for costs that are anticipated, but cannot yet be quantified with certainty. As the project moves forward, the manager tracks estimated vs. actual costs and the overall profitability of the project.

4. Scope – Managing a project’s scope begins with assessing its size, complexity, goals, and requirements. By having a clear understanding of the scope, the project manager is better able to create a viable estimate and schedule, assemble the appropriate resources, and ensure that the team meets its deadlines. Without a good handle on scope, the project can experience scope creep, which can lead to missed deadlines, cost overruns, and decreased profitability.

Taking a holistic view

It’s important to appreciate how each of these project management concepts affects, and is affected by, the others. The skillful project manager addresses them holistically, and makes adjustments in each as the project moves forward. To manage risk and ensure a quality project, managers need to not only understand these concepts, but also have in place the right tools and processes to control them — along with great organization and communication skills. 

Of course, it’s the rare project that goes exactly according to plan… which is why understanding these four project management concepts is so essential. When variances or setbacks arise in any one area, the effective project manager has mechanisms in place to recognize problems in time to make adjustments, and yet still meet the project goals for both the client and the firm.

Checkout more Project Management related articles.

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.

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. 

Every firm is looking for ways to improve workplace efficiency.  Why?  Because the results are happier employees, improved bottom line, and a streamlined work environment.  There are a number of ways to achieve this goal, but what are the top ways to increase business productivity?  Let’s take a look at 5 ways to improve workplace efficiency:

1. Visibility
   Has your firm ever been guilty of making a sales call to the same client as someone else at your firm during the same week or even worse, submitting on the same proposal? When a client calls, do you know within a couple of minutes who the last person was that worked on the job or talked to them, and if there are any previous issues that are unresolved? In order to make quick, informed decisions and have the right information at the right time, it’s important to have real-time access and accurate visibility. Firms with the ability to instantly understand over and underutilization of resources by project and employee are able to quickly re-assign resources to increase productivity. Many firms utilize an ERP system to gain a global view of their company.
   
   
2. Repeatable Process
   Another inefficiency we find are firms that don’t think about developing processes that are repeatable. Firms that take the time to think through processes, document them, and test against them avoid recreating processes and errors each time they are carried out.
   
   Two examples are the execution of a project and hiring a new employee. Both of these should have repeatable processes that everyone knows within your company. What happens when you miss an important step in either of these examples?  You lose money. By not executing the steps outlined during a project, you run the risk of overrun and a project that fails. By not following a hiring process, you run the risk of not having the same standards of candidates throughout the company, which could result in the wrong hire.
   
   
3. Measuring the Right Statistics
   I had an old co-worker that used to create as many activities in the system as they could because that is what was important to their boss. The philosophy was more calls, emails, activities resulted in more sales and opportunities. The problem with this was there were two important factors left out: the quality of the activities and the results of those efforts.  In order to affect results, you have to choose the right statistics then track the results.  Establishing the right measurable goals and expectations help employees understand the value they bring to the company. When setting up metrics for employees remember to:
• Establish goals for the company
• Work with each employee to identify how they will contribute to the success of the firm and gain agreement on those goals
• Measure them at set time periods
  
  
4. Manage Customer Expectations
   Managing customer expectations impacts your long-term relationship with a client. When your customers are happy, your firm spends less time performing tasks that could have been avoided to get the client or project back on track. However, managing those expectations can be difficult to do throughout the project delivery. One way to manage customer expectation is to check-in with the client at multiple times throughout the project. Period check-ins provide your team with the time needed to make adjustments if something is not meeting the client’s expectations. Additionally, handling a small issue is much easier then handling a client that unloads their bottled up frustrations all at once.
   
   
5. Develop Engaged Employees
   Did you know that a recent Gallup poll revealed that disengaged employees – least productive employees -- cost the US economy $370 billion every year?  In the review, three types of employees were identified: Engaged, Not Engaged, and Disengaged.  Engaged employees innovate and use their talents to build the company, while disengaged employees tear down the infrastructure by questioning and disagreeing with anything and everything.  Another set of employees are those that are not engaged. They sit back and avoid committing themselves.  It went on to show that of the US workforce, 29% is actively engaged, 55% is not engaged, and 16% is disengaged. So in essence only a third of your firm is operating at their full capacity.
   
   Each employee has different needs or desires. At times, money is important to employees. However, many employees find other things much more important in a firm: flexible work hours, recognition of talent, or an outlined career path. Ultimately firms should establish an open communication with employees and establish trust. Lack of transparency and understanding of the big picture and goals of the company leave employees wondering and concerned about the future.

The key to improve workplace efficiency is to constantly evaluate, adjust, and improve. What are your thoughts? Do you think your firm could benefit from these 5 steps? Try them and see if your overall efficiency impacts productivity and profitability.