Dear Spreadsheet: It’s Not Me, It’s You
(An Open Letter to the World’s Most Overrated Planning Tool) Dear Spreadsheets, Look, I don’t want to make this weird. But we need to talk....
Author: Team Parallax
How Agencies Are Actually Using AI (And What That Means for You)
How are agencies actually using AI right now? That’s what we explored in our recent webinar with Parallax VP of Customer Success, Grant Hultgren and...
AI Is Killing Effort-Based Pricing—Here’s What Agencies Must Do Instead
Agency pricing models are under more pressure than ever. Not because clients are being difficult, but because the traditional effort-based model just doesn’t hold up...
Parallax Welcomes New CEO to Lead Next Stage of Growth and Innovation
Parallax, a leading provider of predictive forecasting and capacity planning software, announces new CEO for it's next phase of growth and innovation.
What is Resource Management?
What is resource management and how does it work? Learn the basics of the process and how agencies use resource management software to help.
Parallax Launches New Timesheet Solution to Enhance Strategic Resource Planning
Parallax, a leading provider of predictive forecasting and capacity planning software, announced today the successful completion of its Series B funding round.
How to Improve Project Margin: Best Practices from Clockwork
Clockwork shares how their organization improved project margin through operational best practices.
Why The Best Time Tracking Software is the One You’re Already Using
Spoiler: your current time tracking software isn't the problem. Learn how to utilize your current time tracking software more strategically.
How to Calculate, Track and Forecast Project Margin for Professional Services
Learn how to: calculate, track and forecast project margin prior to project completion for professional services.
Why Parallax’s Customers Choose Hubspot
Learn about the pros and cons of adopting all in-one-tools management tools versus best-in-class tools when considering adjusting your tech stack.
Top 5 Factors to Consider When Choosing Capacity Planning Software
We define capacity planning, the benefits of capacity planning and unlock the factors to consider when choosing a capacity planning software.
How to Increase Utilization Rates by Improving Your Capacity Planning Process
We share capacity planning best practices below so you can start to improve the ever-important utilization rates across your business
Best Practices for Agency Capacity Planning 2023
Capacity Planning: a crucial component of the services industry that can make or break the profitability and competitiveness of businesses.
Parallax Introduces New Features to Unify Global Operations, Improve Financial Accuracy and Simplify Resource Management
Now, within the Parallax platform, customers have access to new Locations and Currency features, designed to enhance the user experience, unify global business operations, and ensure greater accuracy within the financial reporting process.
The Secret to Effective Professional Services Resource Management
Resource management is like a well-choreographed dance for digital services shops and agencies. It's the weekly hustle where leaders juggle and allocate people's time to projects—and yes, we know it can feel like a tactical headache, but it’s incredibly important to get right (or close to right!).
Parallax secures $12M in Series B Funding led by Baird Capital
Parallax, a leading provider of predictive forecasting and capacity planning software, announced today the successful completion of its Series B funding round.
Best Financial Reporting Software for Digital Agencies
Financial reporting is everyone’s favorite topic, right? ….right? Financial reporting can feel overwhelming for some agency leaders and team members, so we’re here to help....
Best Practices for Calculating Costs and Maximizing Project Margins
Leaders naturally focus on the “big picture” metrics. But there’s inherent value in diving deeper to understand and align on metrics such as the cost of services and project margins...
4 Steps for Building a Business Growth Strategy
When done right, a well-planned and executed growth strategy can lead to sustainable growth, increased profitability, and long-term success for the digital agency. We share recommended steps for building an effective growth strategy
Embracing Forecasting & Variance Analysis for Your Agency
Let’s be honest: forecasting is hard, and it only gets harder when you don’t have access to the up-to-date data that are essential to create...
The Secret to Resource Optimization: Improving Forecasting & Planning
What resources are available for our active projects? What resources do we need for upcoming projects? What resources would we need if we secure the...
Best Resource Capacity Planning Software for Digital Agencies
As digital services continue to evolve, digital agencies face increasing pressure to deliver high-quality work while meeting tight deadlines and maintaining profitability. Resource management and...
Maximizing Key Account Success: Strategic Planning Tips & Tricks
The power of strategic account planning cannot be overestimated and should not be overlooked. If done well by leveraging simple methods and habits to shape...
Agency Revenue Operations: The Key to Improved Confidence and Stress Reduction
If you’ve been in the digital and development agency world for a while, you’ve likely experienced the struggles associated with growing – or even just sustaining...
Measure What Matters: The Data & KPIs Every Digital & Development Agency Needs To Grow
Does it feel like your business is always on a rollercoaster with too much work and not enough people – or not enough work with...
Best PSA Software Platforms for Resource Optimization
Resource optimization is made simple with PSA software. Here you'll find the best PSA software platforms available and how to choose the right one for you.
Best Strategic Planning Software 2023
Strategic planning shouldn’t feel like an exercise that leadership does in a vacuum, isolated from the context of daily organizational activities—but it often does, and...
Spreadsheet Alternatives for Resource Planning & Forecasting: Is PSA Automation the Best Choice?
Drowning in spreadsheets? Frustrated when one of your formulas breaks, and it sends the whole spreadsheet into disarray? Overly reliant on one project manager who...
Resource Forecasting Tools for Digital Agencies [Complete Guide]
Resource forecasting usually isn’t anyone’s favorite task. Leaders often approach resourcing meetings with dread and leave them feeling deflated—but it doesn’t need to be this...
How To Level-Up Employee Resource Management
Resource management is a fundamental process of every digital services company. It’s the weekly practice where leaders allocate people’s time to projects – and it’s something...
Top 5 Replicon Alternatives & Competitors To Consider
Are you a digital services leader looking for a solution that can better serve your teams, yourself, and your business? We know there are a...
Mavenlink (Kantata) vs OpenAir vs Parallax: Which is Right for You?
See why digital services companies are choosing Parallax over Mavenlink and OpenAir to give their teams accurate, real-time insights and forecasts that accelerate their growth,...
Productized Services: How Custom Digital Services Firms Can Adopt Them
Many custom digital services firms are looking for a simplified way to experience higher margins and obtain predictable, repeatable work. The answer lies in productized...
Parallax Introduces New Features to Enhance Personalization, Optimize Usability
Working in the services industry means dealing with fast-paced everything. People are often tasked with finding and sharing information with both colleagues and clients at...
Stay Profitable and Innovative: Use the Three Horizon Framework to Forecast Growth
Stay profitable and relevant today, with an eye on the trend-setting work of tomorrow. Learn how with McKinsey's 'Three Horizon's of Growth' Framework.
The Power of OKRs for Professional Services Companies
Objectives and Key Results, what most people call “OKRs,” is more than a buzzy acronym used across the tech community. This article explains the power...
How To Strive For 100% Productive Utilization: Complete Guide
This article discusses how digital services companies and tech consultancies can achieve a 100% productive utilization rate by pairing their billable utilization targets of 75-85%...
5 Best Mavenlink (Kantata) Alternatives And Competitors To Consider
Nearly all decisions that leaders of digital service companies make rely on accurate insights and forecasts — but to gather those insights and create those...
Uncomplicating the Complicated: What Utilization (Really) Is and How to Calculate It
Utilization and capacity planning can feel like an impossible equation to solve. But while it’s complex in nature, it can be simplified by focusing on the metrics that matter most.
Modern Work is Changing: Parallax’s Takeaways on Billing the Creative Process, Timesheets, and “Hustle Culture”
One of the main reasons agencies and development studios struggle to break the cycle of too much or too little work is because they haven’t considered how poor resource planning leads to confusion, stress, and burnout. Without mastering forecasting basics, this cycle will continue.
Projector PSA vs Replicon vs Parallax: Which will work for you?
Digital services companies have a lot of choices today regarding the solutions they leverage to operationalize their businesses. See why leaders are choosing Parallax —...
Driving Strategic Growth Requires Mastering the Basics
Digital services companies stuck in reactive business heroics should focus on three key habits to drive smarter performance.
Hustle Culture is Canceled
Retaining your best people has never been more important. By replacing hustle culture with mission culture, leaders can evolve away from dysfunction.
Five Steps to Smarter Forecasting
Riding the "too little work, too much work" roller coaster is a tough challenge for digital services companies. Here are five steps to use data and forecasting to exit the ride.
The Importance of Decoupling Resource and Project Management
Don’t burn out your project managers! In place of task-based project planning, digital services companies should implement a duration-based approach. This is when a certain percentage of each role or a person’s time is allotted to client projects. Why? It will help agencies avoid burning out their vital project managers and scale the business.
The Growth Mindset for Digital Agencies
Scaling a digital shop is challenging. I’ve been there. Last week, we were given the opportunity to speak with other digital shops via the Society...
The Shape of Projects to Come – Accurately Forecasting Resources and Revenue
“The Shape of Things to Come” is a work of science fiction by H.G. Wells and for some digital services firms, accurate forecasts of future...
The Problem with Task-based Proposals
Success requires continuous improvement. This is especially true in the solutions architecture and sales leadership roles I’ve held and led in the custom software development...
Pretty Results and Ugly Processes: Are Home-grown Tools Holding you Back?
Digital services companies are typically born because a small group of people have a point of view on their craft and an ambition to solve...
Parallax’s Top Takeaways from TSIA World
Whether you build websites and apps, provide digital marketing services, or consult with companies that do so, you’re undoubtedly impacted by ever changing tech industry...
Unlock your Project Manager’s Full Potential by Integrating your Tools
A talented project manager is one of the most valuable resources for a digital services company. Set them up for success by integrating your tools...
Great Resignation or Great Raise?
I’m sorry for the shameless clickbait. There’s so much b.s. on the great resignation that it’s becoming annoying. But hey, you are reading this so...
Improving Employee Engagement: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
While it’s critical for leaders of digital services to focus on business growth, they must also address the fundamental needs of their employees. This is...
5 Ways Digital Leaders Can Motivate Their Teams, Driving Strong Cultures AND Business Results
Business leaders don’t need to look very far for commentary on the great resignation. Competition for talent, dwindling retention, and increasing burnout can have a...
5 Reasons your Spreadsheets are Holding you Back
When you first started your digital services company, you likely began building spreadsheets to collect data in a way that represents how you think. These...
Top 3 Reasons Why you Need to Take Action and Adopt Parallax
Just like adopting a new pet, getting married or going on a long vacation, there’s never a perfect time to adopt a new business solution...
PSA Buyer’s Guide: Questions you Should Ask When Evaluating PSA Platforms
Specifically built for the needs of digital services companies, professional services automation (PSA) platforms help digital agencies manage time tracking, contracts, project management, invoicing, billing,...
Strategic Planning for Business Growth: Scaling Your Magic
When your digital services agency is small, it’s easy to stay focused on what’s most important. These early days are nothing short of magical as...
How to Develop a Sales Strategy in 10 Steps
A digital shop that wants to grow must get serious about its sales efforts. If your knee-jerk reaction to the word sales is, “ew,” you’re...
Unlock Agency Project Management Superpowers: Visibility
Many digital services companies and tech consultancies don’t fully leverage the skills and value of their project managers. They often view project management as an...
Run a Reactive Digital Services Firm? Every Employee Plays a Role in Forecasting
Digital services firms are in a constant cycle of reactivity when they don’t forecast well and often. They can’t predict in advance whether they’ll have...
How We Shaped a Customer-centric Product with Our Product Advisory Council
These days it seems that just about every company says they’re customer-centric. We hear all the time that everything every company does is for the...
Utilizing Customer Lifetime Value & How to Calculate It
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a popular metric used at SaaS and product companies, but we don’t see it measured as frequently at professional service...
Resist the temptation to Reinvent the Agency Operations Wheel
Many things make your firm unique from the one down the block: your culture, people, methods, and origin story — to name a few. But...
Resource Management vs Capacity Planning: Why You Need Both
Resource management and capacity planning are indeed two different things. However, digital agencies must consider both as part of the same process to understand customer...
Are Your Company Values BS? Here’s How To Do Them Better.
Corporate values are a set of behaviors that a business and its employees agree to live by and hold each other accountable to every day....
How to Calculate Benchmarks: The Industry Benchmark Calculator
Digital services companies set themselves apart from each other with the caliber of their craft, method, and people. But when it comes to running the...
Duration-Based Pricing FTW!
How should digital services companies price when humans are terrible at estimating time? It’s tricky when your product is your people. Regardless of whether you...
5 Sales Operations Best Practices For a Professional Service Organization
If you’re a founder of a professional service firm, you probably didn’t start the company because you wanted to be a salesperson. You likely set...
How Digital Services Succeed: Revenue Targets
This situation is all-too-common: An agency owner sets revenue targets based on the previous year’s results with the assumption that they should do even better...
How Digital Services Succeed: Project Margin
Project margin is an often sensitive, but important topic for business owners regardless of their size or maturity. Having a clear understanding of the margin...
How Digital Services Succeed: The Employee Utilization Rate Fallacy
There are over 60,000 digital services companies in North America. What sets these organizations apart from one another? The caliber of their craft, methods, and...