Delivering Project Profitability

In its Delivering Project Profitability: On Time and Under Budget report, Aberdeen researchers explain that a business’s success is a function of its people, tools and technology working in harmony. Those companies widely regarded as best-in-class performers have mastered the marriage of all three.

As a matter of course, engineering firms are concerned with the application of physics and mathematics in pursuit of any number of solutions that will make some area of humanity’s time on this planet easier, faster, cleaner and smarter. The profession is a demanding mistress for the ongoing requirement it makes of its participants to stay current with ever-more-relevant knowledge.

Challenges Facing Engineering Firms

Even the ordinary challenges that confront engineering companies in their day-to-day operations are considerable. The imperative to engage in efficient estimating, bidding and delivery are givens. Add to that a struggling economy and the new competition emerging markets bring to the table and you’ve got a scene ripe for revision.

As with pretty much every business making any noise today, engineering companies employ computers and software broadly. In addition to conventional business application software, engineers draw heavily on a vast store of computer-aided applications designed particularly for their profession. It’s a recipe that has the potential to become an inefficient stew very quickly, if not managed with a big-picture eye.

To that end, Aberdeen nominates those companies with a demonstrated facility for stirring the pot.

Best Practices for Engineering Firms

The trick, it turns out, is to identify and implement a system of standardized best practices across the enterprise. As described in the report, Aberdeen’s nominated best-in-class performers are 57% more likely than their poorer-performing competitors to have such a system in place.

Consistency & Standardization

But the key is consistency. Among the prickly hallmarks of a project-management environment is a jumble of competing software applications that threaten to upend progress with their inherent incompatibility. Those organizations gunning for the most stellar corporate showings have standardized their project management applications across the board.

Just the same, Aberdeen points out, barely half of the best-in-class firms it identified for the purposes of this report had adopted such project-management best practices. There’s much potential for improvement here.

The Course of Action

At the end of the day, Aberdeen’s paper urges its readers to undertake a course of action that includes a range of tasks: the implementation of enterprise applications overseeing project scheduling, management, reporting and costing; the introduction of a method by which all stakeholders can be kept up to speed on a project’s progress; and the furnishing of all the players with those tools that will facilitate collaboration.

By establishing their revised selves, engineering companies can achieve performance levels that elevate them to the top-of-their-game.

Read the Aberdeen report on Delivering Project Profitability: On Time and Under Budget.

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]]> http://www.360visibility.com/blog/enterprise-software/microsoft-dynamics-gp/jetreport/feed/ 0 http://www.360visibility.com/blog/business/four-ways-to-boost-your-pr-firm/ http://www.360visibility.com/blog/business/four-ways-to-boost-your-pr-firm/#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2010 20:25:38 +0000 lynn http://www.360visibility.com/blog/?p=661 Public Relations (PR) specialists are unique beasts. In their sweaty palms rests the fate of any number of companies; every client a potential runaway hit or crash-and-burn failure. It’s the promise of the former—secured with an excellent PR campaign that attracts serious media coverage at a fraction of the cost of advertising—that keeps clients, of every stripe, engaging these professionals.

But PR firms’ own operations are often organizational disasters, surviving courtesy of momentum alone.

Critical to success for PR players, in an industry that boasts some $6 billion in annual transactions, is a strong back-office system that exploits current technology and engages proven processes.

Here’s how:

1. Get Consistent

Sure, your PR firm is pure genius, regularly unleashing displays of brilliance on an unwitting public. But having the creative stuff in hand is only one side of the equation. The other side could be your business, languishing in a state of disrepair and the result, an amalgam more characteristic of the last decade than the current one. Consolidate your systems—from accounting to time recording to billing—and yank your operation into modern day. With everyone reading, from the same script, duplications and overlaps will disappear.

2.Increase Your Web Presence

Today’s websites are a thousand times more sophisticated than their predecessors. The best include streaming newsfeeds from your blog. Providing the capacity for individuals to upload content and enough interactive elements to keep visitors lingering for meaningful lengths of time.

3. Automate

Productivity will climb, by adopting a combination of automated integrated general ledger controls, project management modules, time and resource tracking tools, and role-based workflows for your business. Replacing manual systems with clever automated solutions will help with job and resource management, financial controls, corporate workflow and billing.  This will also provide the benefit of freeing up resources for more creative application.

4. Update Your Telephone

The telecommunications industry has not, historically, taken good care of the small and medium business sector, including many PR firms. Typically, these folks make do with systems cobbled together from multi-line telephones, answering machines and overpriced telecomm services. But all that’s changed with the advent of sophisticated telephony solutions—featuring a slew of powerful, flexible features to increase a company’s professional image, cut its communications bills and increase its responsiveness. These sleek telephony solutions are also now affordable enough for smaller firms to employ.

Private Branch Exchanges allow many phone users to share a system with fewer telephone company lines—a clear boon to a company’s efficiency—and voice over IP technology allows the performance of such functions as tracking conversions from outside marketing campaigns, routing calls to different departments, and managing all calls, voicemails and call transcripts from a single interface. Finally, establishing a corporate IP network to run all your lines through will translate into immediate savings on your phone bill, particularly if your people bounce between branches or engage in any kind of long distance.

What got lost in the translation was the necessity for the concurrent adoption, in this evolutionary process, of a corporate-minded approach.

Fine Tuning vs. Reinventing the Wheel

It’s a vast and wildly generalized thing to say, but ad agencies aren’t run like other businesses are. They are idea factories; precious little clutches of genius, too often too engaged in the business of reinventing the wheel to appreciate the value of tuning the engine. But an advertising agency, for all its creative chaos, is every bit the business as the electronics superstore or the accounting firm. Make money or die.

The Golden Years of Advertising

As Don Draper can readily attest, the ad business had its heyday a half century ago. An exploding middle class with postwar dollars to spend was an enthusiastic convert to any number of brands, and the advertising agencies that sprang up to facilitate this exchange have today become the éminences grise of the place. Mass communication pioneers like David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach and Leo Burnett reinvented the industry muscularly and set impressive standards for advertising, cunning that some would argue have never been equaled.

Advertising in 2010

Fast forward to current day – the digital revolution has come and stayed, bringing with it rewritten rules for every corner of the business. We sell advertising differently now, buy it differently, produce it differently, regard it differently. On top of that, corporate clients are pushing harder than ever for cost consciousness and efficiency from their agency partners.

But the business models that oversee the industry have not enjoyed similar revision. Add the recession’s bitter legacy to the scene and cover your ears: there’s a battle cry for a new way of conducting business in the air.

The days when agency management could afford to administrate in the same kind of paper-shuffling, improvised, responsiveness-is-everything fashion that made their creative departments so fruitful are gone. Today’s corporate climate demands a system, particularly in light of the digitally distributed workforces that populate it.

If you don’t have one, get one. Fast. And if you don’t know how, well, just ask.

Departments must be linked to one another; communication must be instant; management must be in a position to provide feedback and direction in a meaningful, effective way; agencies need to be able to pledge protection of clients’ sensitive client data—and reassure clients that their systems are up to the task. And so on.

Automation, in this revised agency reality, must be king.

The Next Generation of Advertising

Those industry participants who understand the value of a comprehensive revolution, who appreciate the need for adopting an entirely new way of conducting business, who are prepared to enact wholesale change in their operations such that business success will equal creative success, these are the next generation of advertising superstars.

This year’s version of the event, which takes place at the New York Marriott Marquis from August 2nd to 4th, hosts CRM users, vendors, analysts and consultants, all in pursuit of intelligence on how technologies and economic forces are changing the software segment.

CRM Evolution 2010 Agenda

As in years past, it purports to cover a range of CRM-related areas over the course of its crowded agenda. This includes those that promise wisdom on streamlining business processes, those that improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, and those that leverage technologies that will forever change the engine at the centre of every successful corporation: customer relationships.

Several keynote speeches are planned, including one by Denis Pombriant of Beagle Research, a CRM analyst firm based in Massachusetts. His research touches on everything from the ascent of the global middle class, to the impact of rising costs of business travel. But he centers particularly on the role CRM software has to play in servicing changing the consumer landscape that seems—increasingly—to value experiences over things.

Social CRM

The advent of so-called “social CRM” is another key theme planned for the event. The newly proactive customer who’s more likely to seek answers from her peers via the Internet than contact the company directly will be discussed at length. As will be the notion that the CRM industry might have lost sight of that for which the customer might be expressing a desire, and instead, gotten caught up in the provision of the technology that will facilitate its expression.

Recent Acquisitions Blur Lines

451 Group’s analyst China Martens recently explained, “the 2010 convention will also make time for the subject of how the market will be affected by the sudden presence of vendors like Adobe and IBM, which are embarking on strategies that blur the category’s lines, including those demonstrated by the former’s recent acquisitions of Web analytics provider Omniture and Web content management vendor Day Software”.

CRM & DaaS

Finally, the trend of Data-as-a-Service (DaaS), or the concept of a business being able to access data wherever it resides, will find play at this year’s event. Customer Relationship Management is poised for marriage with DaaS, at least in some form. This topic will spark a spirited discussion on whether the relationship will work out, which will no doubt occupy a swath of time at CRM Evolution 2010.

I appreciate such conversation and activity around topics such as CRM. It’s only by engaging industry participants in conversation and by exposing the lot of us to the innovation that’s been unfolding in far-flung silos around the world that we can hope to lend even further improvements to a business area as promising and dynamic as this one.

Forecasting – Essential to Every Strategic Business Decision

Call it an art or call it a science—just so long as you call it essential to the continued success of your professional services firm.

Forecasting is the material acknowledgement of the much-ballyhooed crie de coeur that time is money. The more you shell out doing stuff that’s providing no return, the more you’ve wasted. Full stop.

Every last strategic decision a person makes in his/her business should be powered by forecasting, in some shape of form.

Here are seven tips for making the most of it.

1. Pick a Method

According to the Journal of Business Forecasting Methods & Systems, there are three models of business forecasting systems. In the time-series model, data are projected forward according to one of any number of established methods, each of which works from the same basic premise: patterns from the recent past will persist. In the cause-and-effect model, there’s the assumption of an inciting incident that produces a particular outcome. In the judgmental model, managers attempt the seemingly impossible; forecasting in the absence of useful historical data, either because there ain’t any about or because they’ve been rendered obsolete

2. Research

Business forecasting is an ever-more-complicated beast, emerging spectacularly in recent years as the Swiss Army knife of business tools, characterized by a vast range of tackle, from simple electronic spreadsheets to enterprise resource planning software, electronic data interchange networks, advanced supply chain management schemes and an endless stream of Web-enabled technology. Clever forecasting systems have to be able to facilitate data-sharing partnerships among businesses, accept input from a range of different data sources and platforms, operate on an open architecture and feature an array of analysis techniques and approaches. Big breath. Acquaint yourself with the breadth of considerations in play before making any commitments on this front.

3. Choose Measurement Periods that Make Sense

The success someone will enjoy with his forecasting foray is tied up significantly with the period of time he/she nominates to measure. While forecasting is inherently associated with future events, the task depends heavily on events of the past: specifically, during that period singled out for data aggregation. Pick stretches that are neither typical nor atypical.

4. Spread the Wealth

Forecasts are needed throughout an organization. From the mailroom to human resources to the reception desk; every arm of a professional firm needs to be reaching into the potential of this particular brand of predicting. Forecasts produced by an isolated band of individuals are useless. The more heads involved in this delicate and notoriously oversensitive approach to securing future business success, the more likely it will produce some joy.

5. Measure

There’s no promise of growth for that which is never reflected upon. Any forecasting technology worth its teeth provides the means for measuring its accuracy. Indeed, the more sophisticated the forecasting technology, the greater the need for robust accuracy measurements that take it to task.

6. Never Drop the Ball

Forecasting is an ongoing concern. It’s folly to imagine you’ve ever completed this task, can tie it tidily up in a string and move on to the next thing. Forecasts need to be measured, compared and updated…constantly.

7. Seek Help

Just as options for forecasting tools have exploded in recent times, so has the pool of folks with the expertise for advising on them. At 360 Visibility, there’s no shortage of valuable counsel available. Engage our assistance. We’ve got lots to share.

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