Resource utilization rates are a great way to take the pulse of a professional services organization. Besides telling you if your resources are overworked or underutilized, utilization rates usually give you clues about how well the company functions in generating proposals, planning projects, and hiring resources. Yes, the utilization rate needs to be high enough…
As project-based firms grow, they may find themselves with a teetering tech stack. At the beginning, spreadsheets and institutional knowledge were enough to get projects across the line. Over time, different platforms are added as new functionality and management software are chosen by your teams. One day you look up and your business is running…
Small and mid-sized development firms have a unique set of challenges for building, testing and releasing software internally. Specifically, these companies want to capture the time spent on various aspects of the software development cycle within their project-based accounting software. As a project-driven activity, software development requires tracking costs and employee time for each project.…
The Schedule Board in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation (PSA) is a great tool for finding resources to staff your projects. The filter on the left panel of the Schedule Board allows the user to filter the resources that appear. By default, the filter panel allows the user to filter based on eight different…
As a professional services firm or project-based business, there are two key factors to maximizing revenue – utilization and billing rate. While individual firms have some ability to manage billing rates, it is primarily driven by external factors – market fluctuations, economic issues, labor availability, regulatory changes – driving supply and demand. Utilization, on the…
Regardless of location, size or industry, most companies face unparalleled pressures in today’s fast moving marketplace. Continuous change is increasingly the new normal rather than the exception. The same forces that have disrupted so many businesses, from manufacturing to publishing, are creating challenges and driving change in professional services. Professional services organizations that are best…
In the current economic climate, professional service firms are acutely aware of the threat posed by the erosion of profit margins. Without proper planning and monitoring, project margin erosion can sneak up on you gradually. Everything appears to be in order until, suddenly, nothing adds up. And erosion can accelerate quickly. Margin erosion is a…