MyProjectTracker – The Blog

CRM is an important concept for us all and I believe the importance of it has been hidden under a load of jargon placed on it by software suppliers.

Customer Relationship Management a.k.a. CRM as a concept is geared very much towards the larger scale business and is misunderstood or worse, ignored, by smaller enterprises as a consequence. Software companies have made small fortunes creating CRM applications that deliver incredible insights into your customers to help you achieve both loyalty and sales. It is often through the software houses that we hear about the CRM space and what it means to business.

But what is CRM really? Does it apply to smaller companies and do you need software to do it?

In a nutshell, CRM is about finding out more about your customers and to utilise that information in a way to engender loyalty and increased sales. That’s it, nothing more or less.

Does this apply to your business and ours? Yes it certainly does! Every business wants to keep its customers and to increase sales.

This is the point at which people get nervous of CRM concepts as it starts to create thoughts/concepts of “change” and “investment” and “IT” and “time”.

Well it shouldn’t make us nervous and it most certainly doesn’t mean an enormous investment of capital and/or time.

The outputs of effective CRM practices are;

1. Loyalty.
2. Encouraging more sales.

Simply breaking it down to those two phrases certainly makes it easier on the eye as to what you are trying to achieve.
Think about your business – does this mean an expensive investment or is it simply making sure that you look after your customers correctly each time (deliver what you say, when you say and with a friendly face).

This delivers loyalty that will inevitably deliver greater sales as word of mouth is a very powerful tool – especially if you consider the amount of blogs, social networking sites etc on the internet that can be used as “word of mouth vehicles”.
It does not have to mean investing in high-end data mining and CRM analytical tools that are, for the most part, outside of the budget of most of us.

What it does mean is that we look at our operations to ensure they are geared to providing the best possible service to our customers along with the ability to identify and understand their needs.

Where can your operations improve to help better understand your customers needs?

We have all had one of those lightbulb moments which we think will translate into a viable business. The challenge is to have the drive, passion and determination to turn that idea into a reality.

Before an entrepeneur pours all of his or her energy into converting that idea, the most fundamental question that needs to be asked is “Is this a real business?” i.e. is there a market for my product?

The key to determining whether the idea is a viable business proposition is Research, with a capital “R”. How many businesses do we all know which sounded like a great idea, but failed before they were off the ground. The chicken came before the egg.

When we conceived the MyProjectTracker concept, we almost (but not quite) fell into that trap. Having worked in the murky world of IT, we were convinced that we had seen the light and that our idea for a straightfoward, online, hosted project management tool was unique. We had the product designed and quoted for before even thinking about checking had it been done before.

Then we spoke to some friends who mentioned a couple of well known hosted project management solutions and asked whether we could realistically take them on as competitors.

We realised the folly of our ways and put a screaming halt on the product design for a time while we went about doing some proper market and customer research.

The joy of being an e-business is that all of our competition is online i.e. we can see what they are up to without needing to ask customers (though of course we did), trying a bit of industrial espionage or any other trick. Google provided all that we needed to know about what they were up to – the good stuff and the bad.

We were happy with what we saw primarily because it supported our original view that the product had enough of a unique offering that it was possible to penetrate the market.

So if you have a lightbulb that won’t go out, do your research – if there is a market for it, take the jump and give it a go. It’s one of the most rewarding experiences you can have in business, to see your idea come to fruition and on the market!

Good luck!

Santa Claus could not get everything delivered in a single night without being a great project manager. The “Big Guy” has absolutely no room for error in his schedule. Santa Claus must deliver all the toys every year on time and in a single night, no questions asked.

A friend of mine, Daka Delly, actually went to Lapland at the start of December this year and was fortunate enough to meet him. Anticipating this, I asked Daka to ask Santa what are his top tips to successful project management. And here they are…

Open Communication: The second there is an issue Santa is notified by the Elves. But communication not only flows up the chain of command but it is just as important to filter the information down to the Elves on the toy lines ASAP. This creates a mutual respect between all levels and is an enabler for early problem identification.

Control: We all know Santa is a sucker for detail, and how he loves to check all lists twice. But it is this attention to detail that is his ace up his sleeve. Santa is required to have his finger on the pulse at all times. Santa ensures everyone is contributing information to ensure the second something is running behind schedule he can take the appropriate measures to limit the effect on the overall project.

So next time you see Santa Claus on TV, remember those big red cheeks are not the result of a new blusher, but caused by the stress of delivering the biggest project the world has ever seen, and all on one night!!

Resource utilisation, staff utilisation, company utilisation levels – it all sounds a bit “big corporate and consultancy house.” And I’d agree with you – it does!

For your business though, it is a key number that everyone should understand.

So what does it mean then?

Utilisation is simply a fancy way of asking “what are my team actually doing and are they doing what I’d expect?”. In turn this poses the question “Is each person delivering value for my business?”. In MyProjectTracker world, we call it project allocation – sounds a bit nicer we think!

How does this apply in practice for the business manager?

Let’s do a simple example to illustrate.

Your business is architecture. There are four of you – the business owner, a senior architect, a junior designer and a PA.

You (the business owner) expect to spend about 50% of your time on delivering work to customers and the remaining time running the company (including sales activities).

The senior architect was employed by you and you expect that about 75% of this persons time will be spent on chargeable work. The same with the designer.

The PA does no customer work but manages the back office brilliantly. The PA is expected to be utilised 0% of the time on customer projects.

For arguments sake (and easy maths so I get it right), let’s assume that there are 20 calendar days a month that are worked.

Of the 80 possible man days in the month (20 working days * 4 people), only 40 are actually spent on generating revenues for the company. So when calculating what to charge your customers, you need to divide your total costs for the month by the available days for projects and not by the total available days in the month. You then markup accordingly based on the profit you’d like to make.

If you don’t, you won’t be charging enough to keep your business going or you will be wondering why you aren’t making a profit (assuming enough sales of course!).

How often should I check utilisation and why?

You should check your resource utilisation levels every month to validate that your team are spending time on the right things and to make sure your charging model is correct.

If they are under utilised, this is not necessarily their fault! Ask yourself;

1. Do the sales levels indicate that this person should be busier?
2. Have you loaded that person with too much internal admin that not enough time is available for the “real work”
3. Maybe they’ve finished their task early on a project – great, you just made a bigger margin!

If they are well utilised i.e. well over the expected utilisation for their role e.g. the 75% for my snr architect  in this example. Let’s say you find he is working 95% of his time on billable activity. Sounds good but it could indicate;

1. He almost certainly working all the hours in the day and then some.
2. That your projects in trouble?
3. That you underestimated the effort required to deliver them?
4. Is the work he is doing taking too long because either he is not the right person for the job or he has been tasked with something too challenging for his skills? Does he need training?

Utilisation – still a horrible term, but I hope that I have raised it as an important part of your business success.

I thought it would be good to share the origins of the MyProjectTracker product with you. I have read many tales of start-up and journey and some have helped to educate me a little! Hopefully this little piece of prose will do the same for you and if not, well I hope you enjoy the read anyway!

So here’s the story!

In days gone by, a really frustrated professional services delivery manager was continually asking the question of his team “So how are we doing guys?”

You know, the basics of how much have we spent, where are we against budget, are we going to be on time with this bit of work? Easy enough questions but…

This was met with the muttered curses of already over-stretched project managers and their teams and a considerable amount of paper shuffling and keyboard clicking. If the delivery manager was lucky, he got an answer on the same day, but if he needed exact details on budget and activities it would take a-lot longer!

Sigh! And then he’d notice a reduction in project activity from the PM sometime on a Wednesday afternoon /Thursday morning.

“Why?” he’d ask.

“‘Cause I’ve started working on the management report for Friday for you” was the reply, and not without a degree of barely contained frustration.

Not the fault of the project manager, who could say at a theoretical level straightaway how things were going, but the fault of the systems in place to “help” answer these questions.

Madness, thought the delivery manager. How much time was being lost doing reports that were looked at once a week for maybe 5 mins per project? Hours and hours is the answer.  He did the sums once and it was very scary. 8 project managers * 6 hours (48 hours/week or 6 man days!).

How much more focus could have been given to projects and customers if reporting had been easier?

There has to be a better way thought the delivery manager. However, nothing ever changed and eventually the service delivery manager went off to do other things. But the little bee in the bonnet never really went away about trying to sort out the frustrations felt.

So then the delivery manager asked (a.k.a. doing market research) some people in business  what they found difficult in project delivery and they looked at him as if he had two heads.

“Sorry!” said the delivery manager, “I mean when you are doing stuff for your customers like an architectural drawing or building a house or planning an event or.. can you easily answer the question of “How am I doing?””

Some said “yes “and showed the manager the emails, word documents and spreadsheets involved and others were more honest and said that they could get an answer but it wouldn’t be easy.

Not everyone of course had this problem. The guys doing one thing at a time were ok, but those whose businesses were working on more than one thing at a time had a problem even when they were just one man shows.

Ah, so the problem existed outside of the IT world as well. Well then, something definitely had to be done thought the delivery manager.

So he had a chat with a guy who had worked with him in the past and a month later the initial concepts for MyProjectTracker.com were conceived. Thankfully, the guy also had some contacts in a rather excellent web application development company who took on the concept, understood exactly what was being looked for from the off-set and built the vision – along with putting in some cool stuff that hadn’t even been thought about.

Between all, they created something that any business can use to get an answer to that simplest of questions without any fuss or bother!

“How are my projects doing?”

Hopefully you and your business will find this too!

Hi all,

Beta day, and for those signed up, a look into the new approach to business project management!

It’s taken some really hard work and not a small amount of drive and passion on behalf of the team to get to this point and this story will be told in future posts.

So what’s the plan for now?

We have had a huge number of requests to be part of the Beta process, which is great, and we would like to say a big thankyou for signing up.

We are going to introduce people over the next couple of weeks so don’t panic if you’ve signed up and not received the code just yet. Once we are happy with the way things are going, then we plan on opening up in earnest for a wider audience.

So what does beta mean?

It means different things to different people, but to us it means the following;

“Validating that the product holds true in the real world.”

Our market research says yes, but it’s always good to get this re-enforced!

For the beta testers it means you get to use our product for free until we feel ready to start charging for it – at which point you can stay on board with a chance to win a rather nice “to be announced” perk for your business for being a beta tester. The only thing we ask in return is that you provide some feedback (good or bad) via the feedback link at the bottom of each product page.

What about the product during beta?

From a project management and business management perspective, all of the key functions are in place. We have excluded some minor functions for the moment, but these will not limit the beta testers ability to use the product to help their business projects along.

You may see some aesthetic changes as we receive feedback and continue to include things that we want to see ourselves in the product.

In the interim, we hope you benefit from the product and like what you see!

And if I’m not signed up yet?

No problem. If you are not signed up for our Beta, but would like to be, just let us know by sending us a note to info@myprojecttracker.com and we will add you to the list. The more, the merrier in our view.

Hello Everyone

Thanks for joining us here on the MyProjectTracker blog.  We are getting ready for product beta testing on Monday 14th December, which is exciting!

Our plan for the blog will be to talk about all things business, some posts on the product, to keep you up to date and the odd time some general musings on things that catch our eye.

Chat to you soon!

Barney and Eoin.