Tracking Time is Important for Professional Services

For most software and business consulting organizations, having an effective and efficient Professional Services team is a critical component to driving the profitability and success of the company.  Most Professional Services departments assign resources to complete projects or tasks to deliver value to their customers.

An important part of measuring that value is measuring the amount of time and effort resources spend completing those projects and tasks.  Time and effort data feeds into several critical KPIs that Professional Services companies and teams need to be measuring against, such as Billable Utilization and Estimate to Actuals Ratio. If you aren’t measuring time and effort in an effective and accurate way, you simply won’t be able to how profitable your projects are.

A common list of questions that your leaders within your Professional Services team will ask when considering the time and effort spent on projects are:

• What are our projects costing, and are they on budget?
• What is our historical project estimate-to-actual variance? How can we better estimate future projects?
• How optimized are my resources? Do I have enough of the right people to complete my projects on time?
• What are our Project and Billable Utilization Rates? Are we keeping in line with the organization’s objectives?

Implementing a simple, user friendly project time tracking solution allows your managers to answer those questions.  With the right solution, your Professional Services team members can quickly and accurately track the amount of time and effort they spend each day on the projects they are assigned to, which provides the organization the information it needs to help answer those critical questions.

As a software organization, the Professional Services team here at Journyx utilizes our own project time tracking solution to answer these questions.  Without the data collected through Journyx, they would not be able to understand their project costs, compare actual work to estimates, optimize their team’s resources or understand utilization metrics (as they compare to company objectives).