Hear from industry leaders as they discuss the three main challenges of managing people and projects, and how technology—plus a new approach to capacity planning—can help ensure better outcomes and successful projects.
Presented by: - Bonnie Tinder, CEO, Raven Intelligence - Sunshine Brown, Chief Services Officer, HRMS Solutions - Mike Psenka, Founder & CEO, Moovila
Key Takeaways:
Overview: work management is stuck
Here’s a familiar statistic – 50% of software implementations fail – and a higher percentage fail to deliver the expected results. While this statistic has wavered through small advances in process, over time it has remained constant. The reason for failure is not technology in most cases. It’s the people and the team. The good news is that teams, people, and great project management can be the reason why people succeed. The Holy Grail of Project Management addresses challenges that affect project management such as:
38% of all projects are late, and half of those are late by 2X or more. 35% of projects are over budget.
47% of project teams change, which is closely correlated with projects that run overtime, over budget, and have lower customer satisfaction
What is the Holy Grail of Project Management?
The concept is centered around attaining a difficult-to-achieve thing that will yield fortune and success if we can get our hands on it. In work and project management, we consider safe, predictable, accurate and advanced notice – which is a very difficult thing to do.
So many projects are fraught with last minute surprises. We scramble, work late hours, burn out our teams and desperately try to fix them, all of which is a reactive approach.
The solution (and grail) is to accurately predict when problems arise, detect what challenges we’re going to face so we can resolve them early, and help us determine what resources we need to better forecast our project timelines. If it were easy, we’d be doing this already. The technology has fortunately caught up with the need, and we have a path as discussed below.
Hiring, scheduling, and workforce planning
Customers of systems integrators (SI) look for a vendor with great product knowledge, strong processes, and great customer services. Finding the right people to support projects is a major challenge. We look for system experts, and while they’re great at customer service, and know the technology, they aren’t always trained project managers. Technology like Moovila helps fill that last gap.
Subject matter experts can find support with work management technology. Professional services organizations can essentially eliminate that key variable that often holds back progress; project management expertise. Technology can automate the skills and processes so an inexperienced project manager can operate like an expert, both in their subject matter and in managing project timelines.
Managing change
According to Raven Intelligence, and based on 1,300 project reviews, project teams change 47% of the time. That churn is closely correlated with projects that run overtime, over budget, and have a lower customer satisfaction.
In 2021, the professional services industry had the second highest turnover rate, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is double the number from the year prior. This can be attributed to The Great Resignation, a huge challenge both for project turnover and for onboarding new employees and customers.
The importance of scheduling – where tech steps in
Top professional service folks, whether they be software developers, SIs, or consultants, are often saying “yes” more often than “no.” It’s in their nature, but it becomes a struggle to help them manage their time and commitments.
Timeline bottlenecks and capacity conflicts can be seen before they become an issue with the technology inherent in Moovila. It helps take a proactive approach, and prevents missing deliverables.
There are going to be scheduling problems. It’s inevitable. The question becomes, when there is an issue, how much advanced notice do we get? Customers prefer the “no surprise” rule. They would rather get notice that there’s an issue two months in advance as opposed to two days. Today, this is still manually managed.
The good news is that the data is available. We have personal and work schedules, we have the project plan that depicts what tasks there are, who is responsible, and for how long. All that data must be examined every day, and then reexamined when any variable changes.
A proactive approach allows the technology to examine the project for us and send alerts when there’s an issue or conflict. The more lead time there is to insulate problems as a result of change, the better off the outcomes will be.
Workforce planning and visibility
Professional services companies live or die by effective margin management. Visibility into all the variables and factors that go into organizational processes is another grail for the industry. Time to hire and productivity is stretched today due to global supply issues. Conversely, margins erode as people sit idle.
Seeing what the actual work is, and modeling that work to see what’s coming in the future is where tools like Moovila help chart a predictable path when it comes to assigning resources and future planning. Can we model future work more accurately and make better decisions? Yes.
Sunshine Brown, Chief Services Officer at HRMS speaks to the challenges of workforce planning and how a lack of visibility into projects and resources can be detrimental to both employee engagement and customer satisfaction. HRMS implemented Moovila to gain the 30K ft view of managing their business. Sunshine and the leadership team at HRMS now have confidence in bringing on new clients, adapting to scope changes and optimizing resources for better customer service, improved project timelines and increased proactive communications, leading to better profit margins.
Customers are always right, but not always on time
Consultants are more likely spending nights and weekends covering for project issues than telling the customer where they need to step up. This leads to burnout. The tech helps identify and surface the responsible parties in an objective manner to get all sides to share in the accountability and urgency.
Customer reviews that pay dividends
With all of the effort that goes into delivering excellent service, Raven Intelligence provides a credible resource for customers that are trying to sort through the myriad of implementation firms. Raven provides a platform of credibility for the services organizations as well as a trusted resource for customers to analyze which implementation partner is most suited for their projects based on skills, certifications and customer reviews.
Bonnie Tinder, CEO of Raven Intelligence, sees this in their data firsthand. Raven collects feedback on over 1300 project reviews and provides insights to the industry to help customers make the most informed decisions in choosing the best implementation partner for their needs.
Focus on your expertise, and wllow technology to fill the management gaps
Software implementations are plagued with risks and challenges from the start, and require a delicate balance of people, processes and technology for successful outcomes. Before kicking off your next implementation, check out the best practices shared by these three experts.
Learn how Moovila can help your organization with RPAX.
