How to address the effort vs deadline issue?

Problem: Design offices are always squeezed between agreed delivery dates and resources workload and capability. If the deadlines are too tight, the workforce must do overtime and rework usually happens; if the time spent to develop the designs is too long, the deadlines will not be met and the costs will increase. So how to use solution for project management effort vs deadline analysis?

It is critical to do a proper planning of the design development of the projects, but, doing it, is far from being an assurance that the job will go as planned. You must have experienced this a lot of times, either as a resource or a leading manager of a company. Making ends meet in this everlasting clash among time x economy is critical and much difficult as well.

Consequence: The effects of inadequate planning can be very dangerous as it could lead to criticism and stress both outside the company, with the clients, and inside the company, with the resources allocated to the project.

Adequate planning, i.e., achievable deadlines, a proportional amount of effort to do the work and the assignment of correctly sized teams to the do the job, is essential to a good flow in doing the project.

Slim times to do the job implies directly in overtime work or rework, which usually translates in cost increases and a lot of complaining from the people in the company. If the time spent by the workforce is very loose, the deadlines will not be met, and the complaints will come from the client, which is certainly not healthy for the business.

Solution: The solution for this problem passes through the selection and implementation of an adequate project management solution. Adequate in the sense that the solution should be able to:

deal with the planning of the jobs, both in the stage of the proposal as on the allocation of resources for the development of the design.
measure and improve task efforts and performance.
provide you with real-time workload information.
be initially cost-compatible with the size of your business, having the capability of growing alongside with the scale and complexity of the company.
be implemented with no sensible interruption in the projects´designs already being produced in the office.

How can Crunchflow help? We have a project management solution that respects and understands the size of the company and can be customized to address its processes, not the other way around.

It can be assembled to adapt to small, medium and big companies, helping to break down each job into deliveries and tasks that can be assigned to resources, with a precise definition of scopes and times.

It also has an analytical capability that helps managers to take the right decisions, at the right time about workforce planning and availability.

Another feature keeps track of current project backlog to help control project status and workload levels by predicting projects demands. See below the Resource Planning Process on Crunchflow, that makes easier to solve the Project Management Effort vs Deadline issue.