Who hasn’t experienced that lonely moment when your manager/accountant tells you that the project you’ve been spending your evenings and weekends on, which has been eating away at your brainpower for several weeks/months, is suffering abysmal losses despite all the time and energy you’ve invested?
You work for a fixed price? You know yourself.
But why isn’t your project profitable while you’re underwater?
First of all, we blame the sales people: all they had to do was upsell! We’ve already told them: “they’ll do anything to win the project and then we’ll manage…”. Variant: “they under-sold because they don’t know anything” etc. etc. .
Sales people sometimes accuse project management of “not knowing how to count”… The production team blames everyone else.
In short, it’s everyone’s fault, and therefore often nobody’s. And that’s why this kind of situation recurs… often. Great atmosphere.
In reality, this is typical of agencies with no tools or methods for managing fixed-price projects.
Here are a few basic rules to help you turn things around:
Time tracking
Here’s a simple question: do you know how to keep track of how much time each person spends on a project each week? If the answer is “no”, “not too much” or “more or less”, it’s time to remedy the situation.
Furious makes this task simple and even automatic 80% of the time. A real transformation, not only in your project management, but also in your production management.
Weekly monitoring of projects and time spent VS what has been sold
Who checks project overruns on a weekly basis? Do you have a “shepherd” in charge of scheduling?
Even if in some agencies, the charrette is an institution, it is less and less tolerated, and understandably so. You expect your company to be able to assess your workload and rectify the situation when it gets out of hand.
Weekly sharing of project information with the customer
At least once a week, it’s essential to share with your customer-seller the load-to-sales ratios, the schedule, the invoicing… This way, your customer won’t be able to feign ignorance, and above all, you’ll be obliged to deal with overruns as soon as they arise.
Furious lets you share these KPI’s with your customers in just one click!
Valuing the time spent on pre-sales in the sales project
When you win a project, you don’t throw away time spent on pre-sales. Normally, you’ve already made some progress on the project, so it’s only natural to include it in the project timeline.
We talk about it here.
An engine of anticipation
Science fiction aside, with the right tools like Furious, you know before it’s too late that the project is going to the wall. These features help you to monitor and control projects in real time, by modeling complex projects and indicating estimated future profitability right from the start. A real plus for tactically steering your business!
Analyze profitability
You need an analysis of :
- sales profitability: time sold VS time spent
- net profitability: time spent X actual cost of people working on the project VS time sold.
To refine this analysis, it’s crucial to include ROI calculations, an essential method for accurately assessing the efficiency of your projects. This will enable you to better anticipate bottlenecks and maximize the profitability of your resources. The nuance between the two will enable you to evaluate the occupancy of senior profiles or trainees, for example… and that obviously changes everything!
Stopping unprofitable projects
It’s a taboo subject in the agency world, and yet it’s so necessary!
You mustn’t hesitate to stop a project if it’s going to the wall… before it does!
You have more to lose by overloading your teams (the cost of turnover is often underestimated in agencies) and keeping them busy on unprofitable projects than by losing a customer.
Tools like Furious are here to help you keep track of these issues in a highly visual way. Furious also provides predictive insight, alerting you well in advance before it’s too late.
Another advantage (and not the least) is that teamwork runs more smoothly, since difficulties are analyzed on the basis of rational data, and not on the basis of misunderstandings or prejudices between different professions and profiles!
