Parallax

RESOURCE PLANNING & MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

Boost utilization with
margin-focused resource planning

Quickly allocate resources to current and future projects. Track and manage utilization in real time.
Maximize your margin by updating plans to hit financial targets.

Your resource planning command center

Parallax’s resource planning software unifies executives, delivery and sales to determine resource needs with certainty. Easily assess utilization, balance workloads, and match the best resources to the right projects for optimal team performance.

Resource planning

Get proactive with resource assignments using forecasts on incoming demand. Turn project planning into a science with auto-generated resource plans to streamline resource allocation. Maximize utilization for all team members by evaluating and adjusting workloads of your talent pools – in real time. Finally say goodbye to the weekly spreadsheet resourcing scramble.

Resource refinement

Shape resourcing to meet the needs of any project at any time. Search for specific team members, skills, or departments with available capacity to augment auto-generated plans. Quickly assign or remove team members from any upcoming or in-flight project. And assignments all happen in realtime, ensuring all team members have an accurate view on available capacity.

Realtime utilization insights

Maximize utilization from quote to cash. Get real-time insights for all team member’s utilization, compare to goals, and diagnose areas of improvement. Your entire team has the insights to ensure there are balanced workloads and early signs of utilization slippage to take action on. See projected utilization rates by team members and departments.

Project health tracking

See an executive summary of all active projects with alerts on projects that are over budget, past end dates, have unassigned roles + more. Drill down into each project and update resource plans to meet financial targets. Get insight into projected revenue and total project costs in real time for any project. We have your margin’s back.

Sold to actual insight

Parallax takes a snapshot of the original deal you sold along with the original resource plan for the deal, giving you the insight you need to hone your pricing to meet financial goals. Every project completion is another input to your pricing and resourcing strategy to ensure profitability into the future.

Your resource planning command center

Parallax’s resource planning software unifies executives, delivery and sales to determine resource needs with certainty. Easily assess utilization, balance workloads, and match the best resources to the right projects for optimal team performance.

Resource planning

Get proactive with resource assignments using forecasts on incoming demand. Turn project planning into a science with auto-generated resource plans to streamline resource allocation. Maximize utilization for all team members by evaluating and adjusting workloads of your talent pools – in real time. Finally say goodbye to the weekly spreadsheet resourcing scramble.

Resource refinement

Shape resourcing to meet the needs of any project at any time. Search for specific team members, skills, or departments with available capacity to augment auto-generated plans. Quickly assign or remove team members from any upcoming or in-flight project. And assignments all happen in real time, ensuring all team members have an accurate view on available capacity.

Realtime utilization insights

Maximize utilization from quote to cash. Get real-time insights for all team member’s utilization, compare to goals, and diagnose areas of improvement. Your entire team has the insights to ensure there are balanced workloads and early signs of utilization slippage to take action on. See projected utilization rates by team members and departments.

Project health tracking

See an executive summary of all active projects with alerts on projects that are over budget, past end dates, have unassigned roles + more. Drill down into each project and update resource plans to meet financial targets. Get insight into projected revenue and total project costs in realtime for any project. We have your margin’s back.

Sold to actual insight

Parallax takes a snapshot of the original deal you sold along with the original resource plan for the deal, giving you the insight you need to hone your pricing to meet financial goals. Every project completion is another input to your pricing and resourcing strategy to ensure profitability into the future.

Why Leading Agencies and Studios Choose Parallax

Revenue growth
Increase in billable utilization
Increase in revenue per billable employee
Allison Alexander

Allison A.

VP, Operations, Studio Science

“Nothing will be perfectly planned out at the beginning of a project. With Parallax, I can make resource plan changes in real time.”

How it works

Auto-generated resource plans

Once a deal is closed-won, Parallax creates an auto-generated resource plan based on skills needed and capacity of team members with those skills.

Project shaping / resource allocation

From the auto-generated resource plans, you can further refine resource allocation based on more detailed needs of the project. Easily filter for unassigned or unstaffed roles across all team members. 

Project initiation

once a project has been fully allocated, the project gets kicked off and creates spaces and assignments of tasks in your time tracking system – automatically. This eliminates manual reentry. Parallax becomes the source of truth for all rate data.

Active project alerts

Parallax automatically notifies you on items such as unallocated time, projects over budget, unassigned roles, past start dates, and past end dates – the things that need your attention today.

Snapshot plan vs actual

Parallax takes a snapshot of the deal you sold, from your CRM, and tracks costs to the original bid.

Forecasted burn vs budget

Gives project leads a detailed view into project target revenue, target cost, actual revenue, actual cost, and projected revenue and cost.

Resources from our blog

Frequently asked questions about
resource management

Proper resource planning (ie: staffing, capacity planning) is the bedrock of almost every forecast done in a professional services firm. If our resource management processes are contributing to incorrect or misleading resource plans, our understanding of simple things like revenue forecasts, utilization, and when to hire are inherently flawed and therefore lead to poor business decisions. 

A weekly meeting cadence provides the right amount of discipline to capture these changes and put forth the most up to date forecast available. We recommend a clear agenda centered around resolving resource conflicts starting with your highest priority accounts.

Planning in a professional services business naturally exists in a very fluid environment. Project plans change by the day as new information is uncovered and client priorities change. In order to reflect a proper forecast we need to capture these changes weekly prior to joining our resourcing meeting.

The relationship between what we thought was going to happen (plans) against what actually happened (actuals) is one of the best tools at your disposal for validating the strength of your forecasts. The process of identifying and reacting to these variances should match your cadence of collecting timesheets and happen each week after doing so.

The goal is to see out as far as we can by making weekly adjustments to everything we know. However, the further out we look the more variation we can expect. By focusing on the next 6-8 weeks and validating that your team has enough to work on (and verifying no one is about to burn out) you’ll be working off of the most accurate information at your disposal and ensuring you get ahead of any major issues. 

Managing your team’s capacity and therefore utilization requires a disciplined process that generates the best picture available of what the future might hold for us. Managing the myriad variables between sales and delivery is inherently challenging. Organizations often invent processes to make sense of it all, but just end up adding more labor to the problem which creates an even hazier picture. The best practices are simple: don’t overcomplicate by reinventing good hygiene and democratize the load across the organization. Everyone plays a role in good forecasting.

A 10 piece puzzle is infinitely easier to solve than a 1,000 piece puzzle and resource planning is no different. Managing a fragmented resourcing picture leads to an out of date and inaccurate look into your forecast as the amount of time to keep all of those pieces up to date is a barrier to updating. The goal should be frequent, high-level updates that capture the ever changing needs of the projects. Precision is the enemy of accuracy. 

We’re playing the game of trying to predict the future, and humans are inherently bad at it. We need a way of verifying that our prediction of what was going to happen actually happened, and time tracking is the easiest way to do that. The diligence in weekly time tracking allows you to get a new set of facts in each week that you can use to dial in your forecast and drive up confidence in your decision making.

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