Project Management Software

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The Need For Looking Inward?

Counterintuitive? Yes. Keep reading to know why.

Management Gurus exhort companies to focus on customers. They say that companies need to develop an outward-looking culture.

They are of course very right. But what is happening in IT services companies? 

Let us take a detour.

IT companies have been rendering a wide range of complex technology solutions to industries and institutions.

The industry is now examining how to arm business computing with AI technologies.

The need for IT companies to stay abreast of technology, engage with their customers, and train their own people has been urgent and persistent.

While leading their customers for adaptations of new technologies, their own business operations too have become incredibly complex. 

IT companies face multiple challenges in managing their own organizations.

The challenges

Their main challenge is project management. Executing even a single project to the satisfaction of the customer, on time, and within its budget is tough.

Planning multiple projects, allocating resources, tracking costs, and project deliveries and costs are incredibly complex.

Managing 1000s of knowledge workers for delivering various projects requires efficient resource management.

A fine balance between benching (underutilization) and resource overuse (burnouts) while avoiding shortages (missed revenues and profits) is tough. 

With the double whammy of falling productivity and employee attrition, it is no more just an operational issue. It has acquired strategic dimensions. (Listen to this podcast .)

Keeping customers happy isn’t just about keeping them informed. IT companies need to earn their trust by anticipating their need for information, providing it, making timely deliveries, and ensuring error-free billing.

Making customers feel that they are part of the project team and that they have a degree of control is essential.

Have the IT companies fully leveraged available enterprise software to meet the above challenges? 

Is this a familiar scene?

Every meeting starts with a discussion on the correctness of data and consumes a lot of time.

Spreadsheets get discussed and the data that they show gets challenged. All this must happen before any discussion on decisions and actions.

The managers who must manage projects, reallocate resources, prepare project estimates, train and acquire talent, track costs, deliverables, and billing spend a huge time collecting information and validating it. 

It is not just about time wasted. The decisions can be wrong due to outdated data.

And it may take a while before their consequences like dissatisfied customers, missed revenues, and frustrated employees become apparent.

There is a need to look inward.

The need for looking inward

Looking inward is necessary for putting operational processes back on track and gaining a degree of their control. 

It is necessary to identify gaps in the use of enterprise software for managing business processes.

Well-oiled, fast, and highly visible end-to-end workflows are necessary to meet the above challenges.

The spaghetti of software leads to a lot of manual effort, shortcuts, and poor decisions. Higher costs, poor productivity, missed project deadlines, missed billing, higher DSO, loss of trust by customers, employee demoralization, etc. are some of the symptoms.  

The industry has relied too long on a mish-mash of standard -but made-for-products-business software – and homegrown solutions.

With the technology that we have today, the time and effort needed for data collection or validation should be Zero. Managers should have real-time information at their fingertips.

There should be ‘A Single Version Of The Truth ‘.

The Gurus are right, but for a confident outward stance you need strong operational capabilities.

What is the solution?

Professional services automation (PSA) software is the solution.

ProductDossier PSA integrates all existing software like CRM, ERP, HRMS, etc.

It presents information needed for collaboration and making decisions. Your managers will be free to collaborate, make decisions, communicate, and support their people. 

ProductDossier PSA has well-tested workflows and yet it is highly configurable. You will see your revenues, profits, and customer and employee satisfaction going up!

To find out more and for a demo contact us at [email protected] 

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How to recognize a Project Management Culture?

If yours is a company that earns revenues by delivering projects to your customers -e.g. IT services – building a project management culture will benefit you in many ways.

Culture is palpable

An organization’s culture is not what you find written on displays and websites and talked about by its CEO.

Merely having project management software doesn’t necessarily build such a culture.

It is palpable when you ‘walk around’. You notice it in the way people respond to unexpected situations, customers’ demands, and appeals for help. It is also evident in the way decisions are made.

What are the day-to-day signs that tell you that you have a project management culture?  

Can do, will do

A can-do, will-do attitude can be easily spotted. Your people don’t need pep talks. Instead, they need to be made aware of the downsides of doing too much! You need to build guardrails to channel their efforts.

For example, in their enthusiasm, they deliver much more than required by the contract delaying other projects. 

Problems as opportunities

Do your teams pounce on the problems head on? Do your people consider difficulties and problems as opportunities to show off their talents? If yes, they will often present you with an opportunity to earn extra revenue! Talented people take pride in putting their talents to test and pass the test with flying colors. 

There is a downside to it, though. This very ability to solve problems can encourage leaving too much to the end of a project and taking too many risks. 

But if you find your project managers and senior tech people engaged in the following, you have your risks covered.

Fetish for granular work breakdown structures

If your project managers and senior tech people spend quality time defining work breakdown structures (WBS)  in such a way that individual tasks can be completed in hours and days rather than weeks, it is a good sign.

Such tasks can be easily allocated and tracked. It will be easy to find resources with an optimum level of skills for tasks defined this way.  Such detailing of WBS also exposes unknowns and risks. 

A habit of trying out things and testing

Granular WBS mentioned above exposes the unknowns and the risks in project execution.

If your people are often engaged in trying out things (prototyping) the unknowns become known and risks get mitigated. 

If your project managers and tech people insist on providing resources and time for prototyping and testing in their project plans it is a very good sign!

Notepads always open

This bookkeeping-type activity may seem mundane and boring. It apparently doesn’t sit well with the ‘can do, will do’ attitude but it is a very vital sign of a project management culture.

Successful projects involve hundreds of big and small things to be taken care of.

Any missout can be costly. Good project managers and their teams are always on top of those granular tasks. People in such teams have their notepads always open.

(An update in one of the popular meetings and collaboration software will bring automatic note-taking and sharing. It underscores the importance of meeting notes and task lists in project execution.)

Shootouts

Project teams are engaged in shootouts about WBS, technical pros and cons, and the possible risks.

If such shootouts take place in the early phases of projects, they bring robustness to your project planning. 

The twin habits of shootouts and prototyping feed into each other.

Costs are visible

Costs of resources and other inputs are visible to all in the respective project teams.

Costs incurred to date and projected costs are also visible.  When this happens the costs get factored into every major decision.

Project managers behave as CEOs of their projects

Like a CEO, they keep tabs on not just short-term allocations and deliverables but also keep in sight the value their projects bring to the customers.

They are equally determined to protect project margins.  Like great CEOs, they prefer the word ‘AND’ to the word ‘OR’.

Do you see the above signs?

If the above experiences are very common in your organization, you have a great project management culture! Congratulations!

If your organization isn’t there yet, how to build such a project management culture?  We shall look for the answers in the next article.

Related

Webinar

Building Project Management Culture -Key to Improving Project Margins

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How A Top PSA Software Solves A Critical Productivity Problem

What is your experience when you try to meet your colleague or a friend who is a senior manager in the corporate sector, particularly in an IT services firm? Do you have an uninterrupted conversation? Can you have a quality discussion?

Anecdotal experiences tell us that most such meetings get interrupted by calls or texts. Many meetings end with “can we meet later when I get more information?”

A project manager is trying to find a resource

Let’s consider a typical situation. A project manager needs to allocate resources for her project. She might start with her project task list and decide on skill sets and hours needed.

She accesses the HRMS system or a spreadsheet containing names of employees and their skill sets and narrows it down to a few employees.

She then takes a look at the resource loading chart to find out if the employees she needs are available. If she doesn’t have direct access to any of these she will have to send an email and obtain the information.

If she finds that the employees she needs are available, well and good. But wait, by the time she sends the request, that employee has been booked in some other project and the status is not updated yet.

She now has to start all over again or “ talk “ to a few project managers or the delivery head or the resource management group to find alternatives. If multiple project managers try to do this, a meeting is called. You can imagine what happens in such a meeting.

The project manager is also responsible for delivering projects within the budget, therefore she will have to calculate costs incurred on the project and estimate the expected costs and her resource allocation affect them.

Her workflows get more complex because more departments are involved in costing and budgets. Probably she will never find enough time to calculate cumulative project costs and projected costs whenever she needs to make resource-related decisions.

Studies on knowledge workers

Study after study shows that knowledge workers spend too much time gathering information scattered across the organization before they can do their actual work.  

To quote from a report

“a 2018 IDC study found that “data professionals are losing 50% of their time every week” — 30% searching for, governing and preparing data plus 20% duplicating work.”

Does “ searching, preparing data, and duplicating work” ring a bell? 

The critical systemic problem

Managers’ chief responsibilities are: making decisions, implementing them, and supporting and mentoring their team members. If they spend too much time gathering information their managerial contribution goes down and they become the bottlenecks.

If your organization is slow to respond to the demands of the market place, you know the reason now.

Looking to improve the productivity of coders and developers while ignoring managerial productivity can be myopic. If a specific resource to perform a specific task in a project is overbooked, it sure is a problem but its impact is confined. But if your managers are the ‘bottlenecks’, you have a big systemic problem.

What then is the way out?

Your managers spend too much time gathering and validating data due to data fragmentation in departmental silos. The genesis of data fragmentation and data duplication is in the islands of automation.

Your departments are those islands. The data silos are the legacy of automation done by various departments e.g. CRM, Project Management, HRMS, ERP, etc. Each of them serves a purpose but whenever there is a need to combine data, like in the above workflows, they all fall short.

ProductDossier PSA, a top PSA software solves this problem. The PSA integrates all your legacy packages and presents data needed in various managerial workflows like building project proposals, developing work breakdown structures, task lists, and timelines, allocating and re-allocating resources, tracking project execution, estimating current and projected project-wise costs, making and executing billing schedules, and many more. 

The ProductDossier PSA presents all information in real-time and in actionable form. It eliminates the drudgery of data collection and reconciliation.

The PSA software frees managers to do justice to their core responsibilities. The software is modular and highly configurable. ProductDossier PSA can be implemented module-by-module. Each module’s implementation results in tangible gains.

Get in touch with us at [email protected] to find out how to improve your managerial productivity.

More on the subject

Let’s make a wishlist for the best PSA software

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How A Top PSA Software Solves A Critical Productivity Problem.

What is your experience when you try to meet your colleague or a friend who is a senior manager in the corporate sector, particularly in an IT services firm? Do you have an uninterrupted conversation? Can you have a quality discussion?

Anecdotal experiences tell us that most such meetings get interrupted by calls or texts. Many meetings end with “Can we meet later when I get more information?”

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https://www.productdossier.com/blog/achieve-your-project-budgets-using-psa-software/

Achieve Your Project Budgets Using PSA Software.

As a project manager delivering IT services, do you chase other managers to get the right resources?

Do you run after the changing requirements of customers? Are you mostly in reactive mode?

Do you struggle to obtain the status of your project in terms of progress, budget, and timelines?

Do you have to spend too much communicating with team members and other stakeholders?

Is it difficult to collaborate with them effectively?

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https://www.productdossier.com/blog/the-need-for-looking-inward/

The Need For Looking Inward?

Counterintuitive? Yes. Keep reading to know why.

Management Gurus exhort companies to focus on customers. They say that companies need to develop an outward-looking culture.

They are of course very right. But what is happening in IT services companies? 

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How to Effectively Manage Resources?

Resources

If you ask IT leaders to list the top challenges they face, you will find convergence on most of the following

Finding and retaining top talent

Improving security and building robust remote work environments

Pandemic-driven burnout of people

Gaps between required and existing skill sets and competencies

Digital transformation

Hybrid work environments

Chip shortage

You will agree that managing people resources well is essential for overcoming most of the above challenges. Every organization is engaged in capacity resource planning. 

How to manage resources effectively?

Here are the essentials.

1.Build a repository of all project tasks and the skill sets they need

You will need to prepare work breakdown structures for your projects and prepare granular task lists. The tasks should be granular enough so that individual tasks can be completed in a time-bound manner by resources with designated skill sets.

You will need experienced project managers and senior technical people who have insights to build such task lists with needed skill sets.

2.Build a database of employees and their skill sets

Identify the skill sets and levels of proficiency of each employee. These skill sets should match the skill sets in the above repository. Input from your project managers will be essential to prepare a dependable database.

3.Prepare requirement plan for various skill sets

Using project plans as the basis, use the project task repository and prepare a requirement plan for all the resources. Proactive managers will include expected projects with high confidence levels of winning in this plan.

4.Allocate resources, track utilization, and rebalance

Allocate resources to specific projects and tasks as per project and task schedules. You will need to do this iteratively and rebalance resource loads for optimal allocation.

5.Prepare training and talent acquisition plan

Identify emerging gaps in the availability of resources and skills. You can use this to plan the training of employees as well as for acquiring talent.

6.Update the task repository and employee database periodically

As you execute projects and as you allocate and reallocate people you will learn many things. Document your experience and use it to fine-tune your task repository.

Use employee performance on specific tasks for updating their skill set database.

If implemented and maintained well, the employee skill set database can be used for more detailed and objective feedback to the employees. 

7.Perfect, but what is the ground reality?

You have an HR system that keeps track of employee data. You have a project management system.

You combine the information from these to plan your resource allocation. You do these using spreadsheets and based on data drawn from both the above systems.

As new projects come and as existing projects progress, your managers update their spreadsheets.

Employees going on leave, quitting or joining and changes in project schedules need constant updating of your spreadsheets. Your managers struggle to remain on top of the situation.

If you want your managers to focus on effective capacity planning instead of juggling their spreadsheets, you need an enterprise-class resource management system to start with and build it further into a full-fledged professional services automation (PSA) platform.

ProductDossier has a suite of professional services software (PSA) having modules like Opportunity & Proposal Management, Project Management, Resource Management, Timesheet & Leave Management, and Project Financials, which integrate well with your existing software applications like ERP, CRM, and HRMS.

ProductDossier PSA establishes unbroken digital workflows for the entire opportunity-to-cash (O2C) cycle.

It also eliminates the need for the cumbersome use of Excel spreadsheets. To know how to get in touch with us at [email protected]

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5 Point Action Plan to Reduce Attrition in Professional Services Firms

Layoffs by big tech firms have started hitting the headlines. Employee attrition in professional services companies continues to remain a challenge.

The challenge is more complex nowadays because companies need to manage attrition while battling customer dissatisfaction, falling profitability, and market disruptions. Can some software for professional services help?

If you look deeper, you will find that people leave their work because of mismatches and because they see no signs of a resolution.

The mismatches may be related to work, the reward for work, and the environment. The Five Point action plan below addresses the above mismatches.

Action #1 Allocate people by matching tasks and employee skill sets diligently 

This is at the core of a viable people practice. It is also fair to everyone. It is obvious that you are going to need a consistent definition of tasks and required skill sets.

You are also going to need a continuously updated skill set inventory. Well-formed work breakdown structures (WBS) will be crucial here. 

Make sure that you have taken into account even the projects that are yet to be finalized, as long as you have a high level of confidence in winning them. Be future-proof.

Action # 2 Identify current and future resource shortages and recruit

Based on action #1 above determine resource shortages and kick off talent acquisition.

Action # 3 Make employee performance, progress, and career path visible continuously

As employees perform their tasks, update their skills and competency levels. Let them access their data and have dialogues with their seniors. Let this not wait for annual appraisals. Discuss with them what they need to do to advance in their careers. 

Action # 4 Prepare training and job rotation plans in consultation with employees

Consult your people about their training needs and job rotations. Let this be a quarterly exercise. Plan training programs and career moves accordingly.

Action #5 Address issues related to recognition, compensation, and work environment

Recognizing a good performance more or less in real-time is as important as giving people work that matches their current skill levels and future needs. This can become your culture if you are taking all the above actions.

Establish an effective mechanism to address the issue of workplace toxicity due to discrimination, harassment, or bullying. These negatives must be dealt with sensitively and firmly.

Review your current compensation practices and align them with the market. All the above actions will give you some headroom in your budgets by plugging revenue leaks and protecting your margins.

Enable and empower

As you can see, all the above actions support each other and create a virtuous cycle of improving performance. Contrast this with the vicious cycle of attrition, customer dissatisfaction, falling profits, and more attrition.

But how will you do the above? Can you do it with silos of departmental information? Can you do it with islands of automation like CRM, HRMS, and ERP or accounting packages? Can you do it all without collaboration across departments? The simple answer is NO.

You need to digitize all workflows in the opportunity-to-cash cycle. Whether it is a task plan of a single resource or missed billing or project margins in real-time, your managers need to know a ‘Single Version Of The Truth’ every time they need information. For all this, you need software for professional services automation.

To know more about our professional services automation software contact us at [email protected]

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5 Point Action Plan to Reduce Attrition in Professional Services Firms

Layoffs by big tech firms have started hitting the headlines. Employee attrition in professional services companies continues to remain a challenge.

The challenge is more complex nowadays because companies need to manage attrition while battling customer dissatisfaction, falling profitability, and market disruptions. Can some software for professional services help?

If you look deeper, you will find that people leave their work because of mismatches and because they see no signs of a resolution.

The mismatches may be related to work, the reward for work, and the environment. The Five Point action plan below addresses the above mismatches.

Action #1 Allocate people by matching tasks and employee skill sets diligently 

This is at the core of a viable people practice. It is also fair to everyone. It is obvious that you are going to need a consistent definition of tasks and required skill sets.

You are also going to need a continuously updated skill set inventory. Well-formed work breakdown structures (WBS) will be crucial here. 

Make sure that you have taken into account even the projects that are yet to be finalized, as long as you have a high level of confidence in winning them. Be future-proof.

Action # 2 Identify current and future resource shortages and recruit

Based on action #1 above determine resource shortages and kick off talent acquisition.

Action # 3 Make employee performance, progress, and career path visible continuously

As employees perform their tasks, update their skills and competency levels. Let them access their data and have dialogues with their seniors. Let this not wait for annual appraisals. Discuss with them what they need to do to advance in their careers. 

Action # 4 Prepare training and job rotation plans in consultation with employees

Consult your people about their training needs and job rotations. Let this be a quarterly exercise. Plan training programs and career moves accordingly.

Action #5 Address issues related to recognition, compensation, and work environment

Recognizing a good performance more or less in real-time is as important as giving people work that matches their current skill levels and future needs. This can become your culture if you are taking all the above actions.

Establish an effective mechanism to address the issue of workplace toxicity due to discrimination, harassment, or bullying. These negatives must be dealt with sensitively and firmly.

Review your current compensation practices and align them with the market. All the above actions will give you some headroom in your budgets by plugging revenue leaks and protecting your margins.

Enable and empower

As you can see, all the above actions support each other and create a virtuous cycle of improving performance. Contrast this with the vicious cycle of attrition, customer dissatisfaction, falling profits, and more attrition.

But how will you do the above? Can you do it with silos of departmental information? Can you do it with islands of automation like CRM, HRMS, and ERP or accounting packages? Can you do it all without collaboration across departments? The simple answer is NO.

You need to digitize all workflows in the opportunity-to-cash cycle. Whether it is a task plan of a single resource or missed billing or project margins in real-time, your managers need to know a ‘Single Version Of The Truth’ every time they need information. For all this, you need software for professional services automation.

To know more about our professional services automation software contact us at

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PPM: What are you losing by using Excel to Manage Processes?

One of the things we see repeatedly across our customer base is the baseline attempt to manage portfolios using spreadsheets.

It can be any kind of portfolio – Operational Excellence, NPD, M&A, or Capital Projects.

The natural first step in many organizations is to throw a list of projects into a spreadsheet and then try to understand the status and priorities from there.

While this method provides a great way of acting upon the initial challenge, it quickly becomes difficult to manage as organizations try to establish effective Project Portfolio Management (PPM) processes.

There are two types of costs to manually managing PPM processes rather than using an enterprise portfolio management software solution:

The Productivity Cost of manual effort to collect and compile snapshots into meaningful analysis

The Opportunity Cost of managing business impact (mitigating negative impact or accelerating positive impact)

The more disconnected PPM teams are from information either in time or in cross-functional accessibility the more likely it is the business ecosystem will struggle to perform.

This in turn generates frustration not only for the business itself but the people who are part of your PPM teams.

Each stakeholder in a typical PPM process struggles to assemble data into information in a timely fashion.

Stakeholders include Portfolio Managers, Project and Program managers, Project Team Members, and Resource Managers.

Manually managing PPM processes in spreadsheets consumes significant productivity hours on a weekly basis.

Consider the basic tasks in the sub-discipline of Project Planning and Management such as project planning, tracking, and coordination, across scope, schedule, resources, and budget; managing this–as you can imagine–is quite a time intensive.

Similarly, for Resource Planning and Management, evaluating overall capacity, assigning people to projects, assignment of equipment to projects, and reacting to delays and increasing demand due to new knowledge requires focused diligence and data.

When using spreadsheets, Senior Project/Program Managers, Resource Managers, Financial Managers, and Portfolio Managers spend a significant portion of their time manually aggregating data for budgeting and forecasting.

Most organizations prepare for portfolio reviews periodically–the frequency of which depends upon the amount of time to gather the data.

Invariably, the data is stale by the time the review occurs, which often leads to decisions made with less ideal emphasis and with less frequency, which might otherwise benefit the business.

Imagine if this time were instead refocused on the analysis of pre-compiled information and elevating PPM players to more strategic management conversations.

Think about it – if you as a program manager, project manager, resource manager, financial manager, or portfolio manager spend hours a week compiling information and producing reports that are hours every week that you are not focused on problem-solving, just managing information.

A spreadsheet can provide a good one-time snapshot, but keeping it up to date daily becomes a challenging exercise.

Dates shift, resource commitments shift, and strategic, tactical, and financial priorities shift.

Spreadsheets fail when it comes to reacting quickly to real-time business ecosystems.

In turn, PPM players cannot react to advance indications of an ecosystem tipping out of balance whether it is a key project that looks like it’s moving well ahead of the track or directionally progressing off track based on leading indicators.

As we have realized the shortfalls of using excel, instead of using spreadsheets we should go for a good Project Portfolio Management software solution.

It automates the project process, improving project profitability and reducing project execution time.

It helps your organization overcome the challenges like lack of visibility in project status, resource utilization, revenue leakages, and quality delivery, elevating your PPM process enablement beyond where it is today and reducing the amount of time spent manually managing stale information.

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https://www.productdossier.com/blog/7-effective-ways-to-overcome-resource-conflict-challenges-within-professional-service-industry/

ting requirements of resources for multiple projects is a recurring challenge in the professional services industry.

Such persisting conflicts cause revenue losses, lead to customer complaints, and result in employee fatigue and burnout. 

Look deeper and you will realize that recurring resource conflicts push your organization into a downward spiral of declining corporate performance.

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What is Revenue Leakage: How to Calculate it and Ways to Stop it

Revenue leakage is the same as missed sales billing. You can prevent revenue leakage, improve project governance, and win customers’ trust.

Every project contract has its special terms and conditions. Norms for revenue recognition too are different. 

If you have 100s or 1000s of resources working on multiple projects the challenges grow multi-fold.

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Why Program Management Software Is So Important!

Program management software offers an overview of all related projects, tools keep them working together and meet the organization’s goals and objectives.

Organizations execute strategies through a combination of programs and projects. To set the context, programs are larger in scope, complex in design, and involve higher levels of change. 

Program management involve managing two or more related projects to deliver business value.

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Why do you need Project Portfolio Management Tools?

Project Portfolio Management Tools is with the process of selecting projects and programs with an objective to optimize ‘business value.’

Where does a Portfolio fit?

Projects and Programs are about ‘Delivering Products/Services Right.’

Portfolios are about ‘Deciding Right Products/Services!’

We observe that portfolios are ‘externally focused’ – keeping a close watch on industry trends, technology changes, customer preferences, competition, regulatory norms, etc.

The below image captures the salient information and decision-flows within a portfolio life cycle.

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PPM:What are you losing by using Excel to Manage Processes?

There are two types of costs to manually managing PPM processes rather than using an enterprise portfolio management software solution:

One of the things we see repeatedly across our customer base is the baseline attempt to manage portfolios using spreadsheets. It can be any kind of portfolio – Operational Excellence, NPD, M&A or Capital Projects.

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Why invest in Professional Service Automation Software? - ProductDossier

Technology is all around us. There is no industry that is untouched by technology and professional services is no exception. However, the business case for investing in a Professional Services Automation Software is not adequately presented. Most of the justification is around elementary – improvement in efficiency and effectiveness. In our opinion, this is a… Continue reading Why invest in Professional Service Automation Software?

Let us review some of the salient key reasons that drive the implementation and adoption of professional services automation software.  

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What Is Operational Workforce Planning and Its Importance?

Operational workforce planning is best done on the foundation of SWP. It aims to optimally utilize people for various projects and tasks.

Strategic workforce planning is like keeping your gunpowder dry, keeping it battle-ready. You need to put it to good use, or else it will lose its power. For this, you need to do operational workforce planning.