Project Management – Start planning and improving your results

Stop reacting to your projects (by using timesheets) and start planning and improving your results.

Scenario: Your margins are not that well and you know that you have been working over budget on projects that are Fixed Price. But your timesheet software and process is not helping you to understand this better. So what to do to improve your productivity and profitability?

Problem: Many companies work in Time and Material contracts with their clients. In this cases, planning is important, but not critical, since you will be able to charge your team’s time on jobs that they have worked on and scope changes are not that harmful. But in a lot of cases, companies agree to work on a Fixed Price contract with their clients and so, every single minute spent over what was estimated on the budget deteriorates the company’s margins.

This happens especially because your team don’t get the full picture of the contract and its terms, and since there is no evaluation of the project phase and performance until after a quarter or a year is closed, it becomes too easy to work over the estimated budget of the project.

One other thing is that looking only at timesheets doesn’t give you visibility of the future, only of the past. You are not planning, you are reacting to your projects.

Solution: Here are some important steps to start to proactively manage your projects:

a) Separate the projects by type (time and material or fixed price);

b) Understand your project status (what phase each project is)

c) Define a process for starting any new task on a project, that should contain at least the following analysis.

a. Is this in the scope of the project?

b. Is that phase closed yet?

c. Is this a change order?

d. Do I really need to do this task now?

d) Plan your tasks ahead and with that, your company’s results.

e) Integrate project planning with timesheet and get better.

How can Crunchflow help? Our platform has a lot of ready-to-go applications for managing projects, scopes, financial milestones, change orders and timesheets.

We also have embedded analytical solutions that enable you to check on the flight your project status and results, so that you can take better decisions when and where they are needed/

Want to know more? Get in touch and we can schedule a demo for you.

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