Do you have trouble to acknowledge project status?

If this problem is recurrent in your daily routine, this post is for you.

Problem: How to determine, and check, the real status of a project? A project demands a lot of people working in many different interdependent activities. People in many production and management levels and with various skills must work together to achieve the delivery of the stages of a project on-time. How can I keep a reliable control over the work really being done by my team? How can I avoid bad surprises on the partial and total delivery dates agreed with the client?

Consequence: When a company doesn’t know exactly the status of a job, it is very difficult to ascertain its cash flow, its capacity of correctly assume a compromise with dates and speed of both its backlog and new contracts under negotiation. Committing to new deadlines and milestones can be a real jump in the dark.

Delays very much stress the relationship with clients even leading to losses and legal costs. Things can get worse when the announcement of these postponements of deliveries are informed after the deadline is past. It is not an alert, it’s a late confirmation.

Not to mention the financial burden that this lack of knowledge can bring to the cash flow if the financial department has little information on the planned x executed reality. Being not sure of how much income the company can count on is very distressful and potentially dangerous.

Solution: To have a control methodology that works. Assigning tasks that are the responsibility of only one resource is a good way to start this control. If every person is responsible for just one task at a time, this control becomes very straightforward.

Control of the effective conclusion of the tasks assures that the development of the project is being kept on the planned pace, making possible to alert the client in advance for an eventual adjournment in the expected deliveries. This beforehand alert diminishes any possible stress in the negotiation of new milestones.

Linking the end of specific tasks to financial milestones is a direct way to assure the health of the cash flow.

How Can Crunchflow Help? Crunchflow is a managing platform with features specially formulated for the design office. It allows the splitting of the job in single tasks and the assigning of the tasks to individual resources, assuring that to no resource is assigned more than one task a time. One of the cornerstones of the platform is every resource can do only one task at any time. A new task can be assigned only when the actual task is recorded as done.

This simple, yet ingenious, dogma is very powerful, as it gives the management the power to receive alerts when there is a delay and act promptly to solve this problem, either by contacting the client in advance to negotiate a new milestone, or to split the task in smaller and more manageable ones, or to have this split tasks allocated to other resources with spare time in his schedule.

Crunchflow keeps a grip on the financial milestones, alerting the management the eventual internal need of a change in the company’s overall schedule to meet its income necessities. This cross-linking between delivery dates and income events is of paramount importance to the financial health of the company, as it is always a good point for the management to keep an eye on the next income of any job. There must be a preference for doing the tasks that generate near income over the ones that will generate incomes in the future.

Project Status Screen