Blogs, Professional services (PSA)
Making better decisions
Microsoft Excel is still the default choice for many Professional services organisations when it comes to planning staff resourcing, owing to its ease of use and flexibility as a business tool. However many PSO’s we’ve spoken to find that Excel quickly becomes unwieldy when used to manage multiple projects that involve lots of staff, and especially when trying to calculate the impact on a projects profitability without the benefit of real-time staff availability.
Early warning signs
Keeping a keen eye on the cost to complete for a project is key to its profitability. Timemaster’s early warning traffic lights track your project targets for you in real-time, allowing you quickly to spot those projects deviating from their plan.
Having identified a project which is veering away from its plan, the latest version of Timemaster provides enhanced tools to help you take corrective action to bring it back on track.
Getting back on track
Project managers rarely have the option to renegotiate the deliverable, they either need to increase the delivery timescale or possibly add more resources to complete the project to the original timescale.
Using Timemaster’s resource planner, you can build an accurate cost to complete for the remaining work whilst keeping an eye on both your original baseline and predicted profitability. It provides a central view of the availability of all your staff, what tasks have been assigned to them, and which of your staff have available time.
When you are updating resources on an existing task where the plan has gone astray, its beneficial to try out a few scenarios and then not only seeing their impact on the task outcomes, but also on the overall effect on your predicted profitability for the project.
Deciding to add resource to a task on a project is simpler if you have overall staff availability visible on-screen alongside your project’s tasks and their current resource allocation. Better still, colour code their time allocation so it’s super clear those that have time available are shown in green.
Either adjust the time staff need to work on a task, or stick to the original timescale and possibly add additional staff, all without committing to those changes until you a happy you have the right plan to bring the project back on track ahead of saving them.
Making the complex simpler
Choosing the new project resource plans multi-task view allows you to quickly work your way through all tasks and their assigned resources for a particular project, all within the same screen.
Complex multi discipline projects can simply be filtered by service and tasks can be collapsed or expanded; optimising the visible area of screen to only the tasks you are particularly reviewing.
Inline editing of allocated hours and visibility of the available staff resources makes it easier to edit projects in play whilst seeing the effect of the project’s financials ahead of committing to those changes.
Getting in touch
PSOs that use Timemaster’s resource planning will be able to more accurately predict project profitability, gain central visibility of staff availability to complete those projects, and be able to better forecast pipeline resource requirements.
We’d love to help you make your business become more profitable. Contact one of the Timemaster team for more information or for a personal demonstration.