Our company, from the beginning, has focused on providing IT solutions for the professional services industry. The unique needs of organizations like audit firms or software companies serving clients have become the foundation of our success. To secure our market position and the loyalty of our clients, we had to prove that we truly understand the challenges they face and offer tools to facilitate their daily work. Evaluating project profitability or the profitability of all a client’s projects are issues identified across the professional services sector. The need to bill clients for the time spent working on their behalf required effective time-tracking mechanisms and tools that motivate employees to regularly complete timesheets. IT tools also had to ensure flexibility in billing for clients who, due to the size of their organization, had significantly stronger bargaining power. We needed to understand these challenges and be ready to address them.
For over a decade, our portfolio has included the Maconomy ERP system by Deltek, specifically tailored for this broadly defined industry. The system has always been effective at measuring various company metrics and creating indexes for synthetic analysis of the company’s health, while also enabling the automation of a significant portion of business processes. Relatively early in its development, Deltek recognized the need for an efficient resource management module.
People Planner is a planning module that allows us to define each employee’s competencies as well as their preferences regarding the type of work they perform. We know if they are willing to travel, what their language proficiency looks like, and whether they are competent to manage projects independently or prefer teamwork. We understand which technologies they are comfortable with, which require supervision, and which tasks they handle well versus those that may present challenges. We also know their domain knowledge—after all, a senior marketing specialist may be adept at creating engaging TV ads but might not know which tools to use to promote a brand on social media. An experienced web developer may not excel at writing code for industrial controllers or creating AI algorithms. People Planner also helps us determine a person’s availability. In organizations with highly experienced employees, some may be able to work on multiple projects simultaneously. So, how can this be put into practice?
During the final stages of client negotiations, we already know the scope of the project to be undertaken. We can identify potential tasks for this project type and stage with a high degree of probability. Thus, we know specific competencies will be required for execution. The person handling the sales project enters these details, including the client’s pricing and other requirements, into the integrated CRM module. This information is visible to the planner responsible for assigning the appropriate competencies to current and future projects. Consequently, we know how our HR policy should evolve in the future—whether we should hire new staff or let go of less profitable employees. We have reliable information on which to base such decisions.
Planning is a continuous process. Some projects end, others transition from creation to development, and some require maintenance. When a project manager receives a change request from a client, all that’s needed is to add a new line to the project budget, describe their needs in the comments field, or request a modification. This information goes to the planner, who either assigns the appropriate people to the task or shows the project manager a pool of employees from which they can select the necessary individuals (it’s also possible to request a specific person). Thanks to Maconomy’s integrated ERP system, this minor change automatically assigns tasks to the designated employees, allowing them to record their working hours, automatically analyze the project budget, adjust the closing budget plan, and perform a range of other planned actions.
System integration and the ability to automate almost any process mean that linking the system with other technological tools used by professional services companies further expands these capabilities. When we change the project budget in Maconomy by altering or adding a new task, corresponding tasks are also created in Jira, and the values are adjusted after assigning responsible individuals.
People Planner is a module that allows full control over all projects, the employees assigned to them, and their unique skills. Managers can see where they should allocate more resources and the direction of the organization’s human resource needs. They also see the workload of individual employees and how much time these employees dedicate to client work versus other tasks, internal projects, or administration. People Planner is an essential feature for companies that rely on the efficient use of their most valuable assets—their employees.
