become a utilization hero - unit4 · 2020-04-13 · 3 unit4 become a utilization hero each of these...

Become a Utilization HeroHow to optimize utilization of your human and physical resources with 360° visibility across all of your projects

In business for people

2 Unit4 BECOME A UTILIZATION HERO

Having billable talent sat on the bench can be devastating for your business and its profitsBut, as projects and Professional Services businesses grow more complex and customers more demanding how can you utilize your human and physical resources to their optimum? How can you be a Utilization Hero?

The key to hero status is visibility. Visibility of your people, your projects and your processes. With it you can react to ever-changing landscapes and maximize revenue at the same time as avoiding project overloads.

• PS industry average net profit 2012 – 16.8%*

• PS industry average net profit 2013 – 11.4%*

• PS billable utilization 2014 – 71%*

• SPI target billable utilization – 75%

(1,500 hours/187.5 days annually)

* SPI Research

Become a Utilization Hero


Each of these areas is vital to allow you to optimize staff utilization, track and forecast projects, allocate the right people, and boost profitability. Take a few minutes to learn what we can offer your business, and how we can help you on your journey to become a true Utilization Hero.

Contents

Our Utilization Hero manual offers tips, tactics and techniques that you can use to drive continuous improvement in four key areas:

1. Scouting Talent 2. Tackling Global Projects 3. Breaking Down Silos 4. Using Integrated Analysis


Scout talent Hire the best and keep them motivated and skilled

We were at a place in our evaluation where we needed ‘turn on a dime’ execution, could demand instant and up-to-date ad-hoc information for decision making, and could recruit and integrate hundreds of new employees each year.”

Paul Williams, Chief Information Officer, Alvarez & Marsal


Eradicate gaps between Project and Resource teams

A major challenge for Professional Services (PS) managers is to keep your key staff properly skilled. The market and the skills clients demand change in lockstep. What one day is a billable skill, the next may be yesterday’s news. Spotting skills gaps can be complicated when your systems aren’t integrated and process performance gaps exist between departments. Integrating project and resource management with HR allows you to identify areas where staff need training, and lets you take a strategic approach to optimizing the skills your bottom line depends on.

Focus on staff satisfaction

Losing staff to rivals might superficially improve your remaining staff’s utilization rates in the short-term, but it’s clearly not sustainable. Training replacements and giving them time to learn your culture and processes is a further drag on optimal utilization.

It’s far better to use visibility of the demands on your people’s time and travel to avoid burning out your key resource. Complementing this sustainable approach with targeted training to make your people feel valued, motivated and engaged will drive down attrition rates and help you to attract the best – most billable – fee-earning staff.

Scout talent


Stop people acting defensively

Projects change. This can prompt resource managers to act defensively and tie up billable staff when they’re not actually going to be used. Talent silos develop, managers manage the silos and utilization rates are eroded while other projects are held up.

Resource managers who are empowered with visibility of people’s skills, their planned work and absences, tentative and recurring bookings, what tasks they have in their workflow and which need manager approval, can break down these silos and optimize utilizations rates.

Enable smart resource requests

Project managers are at the heart of your business. They know the skills that are needed and how to put them to optimal use. So, why not give them the tools to make informed requests for resources?

Integrated tools are available that allow PMs to request resources of a particular type, skills and competency filtered by cost centre and availability. Because the tool is integrated with the RM’s solution, all communication can take place on-system and be captured and actioned in one place, rather than hidden on emails and spreadsheets.

Recruit and sub-contract only when you really need to

Having trained your workforce in the skills your clients are crying out for, the last thing you want is for consultants to be on the bench. So, why accept a situation where valuable resources are benched in one area, when subcontractors are being used elsewhere in the business?

Resource managers should be able to turn recruitment and sub-contracting on and off to make sure colleagues across the business make the most of the talent available to them.

As baby boomers retire, managing the talent cliff will not be easy. Finding, training and retaining high quality staff will be a challenge for all. PSOs must have the tools to accurately plan, hire, staff and execute services and, on top of that, tools that will assure their talent to work in the most effective way.”

Personnel Performance Planning report, SPI, 2015

Scout talent


Tackling global projects Deliver high quality services on time, scope and within budget

Business as usual is the top priority. We aggregated the Siemens project teams and data using our existing IT teams without unnecessary turmoil. For us, it’s no surprise Agresso can do this – we’ve successfully handled more than 20 other merged companies. Agresso is the sole foundation for our entire group – 8,000 employees at 150 locations.”

Petter Hakanson, CIO, CCO & CBDO, Bravida


Tackling global projects Kick the Excel® habit

Maintaining Excel spreadsheet project plans is a bad habit that is doing you no favors. It relies on constant communication between resource and project managers, HR and sales teams. It can be an effective way to optimize utilization rates, but only if nothing changes and you have time to manage it.

Considering the constant change that shifting demands, priorities and expectations throw up, it’s unrealistic to expect Excel to cope. An integrated solution that makes changes instantly visible to all stakeholders and supports collaboration by keeping communication on-system rather than siloed in email inboxes, will free you from Excel.

Give people modern tools

Your people need to have tools they want to use. Intuitive user interfaces and social tools in mobile-enabled, cloud-powered solutions encourage collaboration and improve visibility of individual projects.

Know the implications of change

When resource conflicts occur you need to take action to resolve them. Having to wait for a conflict to be communicated to you is inefficient and could create the conditions for more conflicts to take place.

You should be automatically notified of change immediately by a solution that offers suggestions for resolving the conflict. But what if the resources you want to deploy have different working patterns – part or full-time, for example – competencies or cost centers?

Your solution should take account of these automatically and remove the need to wait for updates from HR. To optimize utilization rates you need to know that if anything changes, the impact is visible immediately.

Recognize your staff’s time properly

Crude utilization rates that take no account of time spent on valuable but non-billable tasks are misleading and problematic.

Internal project work, for example, can be considered utilizable so you should be able to recognize and count that time as such. Otherwise, how can you produce accurate utilization rates for individuals or their teams and manage against utilization targets?


Breaking down silos Budget, forecast, measure and manage cash flow

We exist in a dynamic and fast changing project-based environment and from the wide range of products we looked at, UNIT4’s solution was the only one which could deliver comprehensive project accounting and management information to the standards we require.”

Project Manager, WSP

Leaders that are focused and specialized are able to win larger, more impactful projects so average revenue per project is significantly higher ($235,000 more per project). They focus on profit in all aspects of the business with metrics for profit by person, project and subcontractor – the direct result of real-time visibility to all aspects of the business.”

Professional Services Maturity Benchmark Best-of-the-Best, SPI, 2015


Breaking down silosStart planning from the sales pipeline

Today is too late. You know that plans need to be in place for projects to be executed and utilization rates optimized. Sales teams need to be confident that their colleagues will be able to deliver what clients have been promised.

Integrating your CRM solution with your project management and resource scheduling software streamlines this process. Project plans can be triggered when a prospective deal reaches a certain stage in the sales funnel. This also gives managers visibility on future skill and resource requirements – a shortcut to increasing tomorrow’s utilization rates.

of future projects, allows clear assessment of their financial viability. Give PMs the ability to produce draft plans, and they have a sketch book to test their ideas on optimizing utilization. Equally, let them optimize their own time by letting them turn existing plans into the basis for new ones.

You need access to real-time financial data synchronized from timesheets and the general ledger in a project dashboard so you can monitor, measure and manage metrics as required.

Use modeling to scope project viability

Managers’ experience and instinct can be a good guide to the viability of a project but they’re not foolproof. The shifting demands and complexity of projects make having clear costs and projections a vital part of optimizing utilization rates.

Consider costs when staffing projects

Consultants’ skills, experience and competency levels all affect the billable rates. You may also want to use people from a particular cost center or cost category. To drive all your people’s utilization rates up, and not burn them out, you have to be able to search by any form of analysis, skill or experience.

Track how change affects cost and profitability The pressure to manage change and meet deadlines can become all-consuming. Without maintaining a focus on costs and profitability, all your efforts to optimally utilize key staff can be for nothing.

You need to be able to use predictive analysis to see how changes you need to make affect cost and profitability. You need to understand that if you swap people or extend their deployment, how the change in billable rates will impact your financial forecasts. Having access to reports that track variance between what you think will happen and your original budget gives you visibility.Track what is happening now

Even the best laid plans can go awry. With teams in multiple sites, often scattered across countries and continents, a lack of visibility can be a major barrier to optimizing utilization.


Using integrated analysis Connect the dots with multi-dimensional analysis for insight at every level

UNIT4 Agresso offers us an enterprise-wide and integrated platform. It gives us fast, accurate understanding of the numbers and allows us to immediately to react to changes in the market.”

Benoit Maerten, CEO Temco Europe


Deploy predictive analytics

Your business has got where it is by having a track record of success. You and your colleagues have contributed to a huge back catalogue of project and resource plans. So, why not leverage that experience with analytic technology?

How much time could you save with a tool that suggested previously executed plans depending on the profile of an up-coming one? You could make tweaks and amend plans as required, and use the achieved utilization rate as a benchmark to improve upon.

Consider the cost of change

Having 360° visibility across all projects and all stages of the project lifecycle is a major win in driving optimal utilization. Integrating competency management from HR with project and resource planning unlocks clarity on what skills are in demand, their cost, availability and profitability. Linking CRM and finance to the overall picture unlocks pipeline planning and reporting.

But unless these systems can be easily adapted, ideally by in-house IT staff and without the need for expensive external consultancy, you will surrender much of the profitability gains that integration brings.

“These extraordinary figures are a direct result of integrated business applications which provide real-time visibility of all aspects of the business,” according to SPI. Genuine visibility allows you to measure profitability by person, consultant, project and sub-contractor.

Measure performance to drive up standards

The best performing PS firms work on the most profitable jobs. SPI’s 2015 PS Maturity Benchmark finds these projects are worth $235,000 more in revenue to the best performing businesses, or $86,000 more per person and $107,000 more per consultant.

Integrate your applications

Integration of financial management, HR and professional services automation unlocks the ability to plan and execute efficiently. As well as the benefits set out elsewhere in the manual, integration allows financial teams to align revenues and costs and delivery teams to focus on quality and productivity. This integrated approach means both teams can enable consultants to optimize their utilization rates.

Using integrated analysis


Unit4

We hope you’ve found thoughts on how to Become a Utilization Hero interesting and useful. If you’d like to find out more about how Unit4’s solutions can help you achieve your goal, visit projects.unit4.com or email us on [email protected]

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become a utilization hero - unit4 · 2020-04-13 · 3 unit4 become a utilization hero each of these...

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