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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% with productive utilization targets. The article defines the difference between billable utilization and productive utilization, why it matters, and how to achieve it. The article also suggests that companies should set aside time for innovation, cross-training, and investing in their employees’ professional development.

The key takeaways are:

1. The difference between billable and productive utilization.
2. Why it is essential to focus on both billable and productive utilization targets.
3. The benefits of dedicating the remaining non-billable time to innovation and development.
4. Tips on setting aside time for innovation and cross-training.
5. The importance of investing in professional development to retain top talent.

How to pair billable & productive utilization targets

High-performing digital services companies and tech consultancies regularly achieve billable utilization rates of 75-85%. If you consistently hit this target, you’re doing pretty darn well. However, what really sets high-utilization businesses apart from one another is how they dedicate the remaining 15-25% of their employees’ time.

Digital services companies that proactively plan how their employees spend their non-billable time can more effectively innovate to stay competitive and build a culture that attracts and retains the best talent. It’s time digital services companies and consultancies pair their billable utilization targets of 75-85% with productive utilization targets of 100%.

Billable utilization vs. productive utilization

First, let’s define how we think of the difference between billable utilization and productive utilization. We’ll approach this with a 40-hour work week in mind.

Billable utilization is the number of hours employees bill (invoice) to clients divided by the number of hours they’re available (capacity). If your employees bill 32 hours of a 40-hour work week, their billable utilization rate is 80%. Most digital services companies will segment utilization rates by employee type because individual contributors will typically bill more to clients than managers or leaders who spend more non-billable time on people development and managing the business.

On the other hand, productive utilization is the percentage of time employees charge time to clients plus other budgeted value-added initiatives that are also important but don’t contribute to immediate revenue. Building a new service offering or other intellectual property (IP), doing pro bono work for a client, or deploying new internal tools (like Parallax to improve your services’ KPIs ) are all examples of work that is “productive.” Filling out timesheets, attending internal meetings, and admin activities are examples of true non-billable, non-value-added time that tend to bloat services firms as they start to grow (but are usually still necessary to get done).

Why the difference matters: Billable & productive utilization

When digital services companies focus only on billable utilization and neglect productive utilization, it leaves a gray area. How should employees spend the remaining hours they have available each week?

Of course, if there’s more work in the backlog, you can fill some or all of your employees’ time with more client work. There’s nothing wrong with billable utilization rates exceeding your target, as long as employees aren’t consistently and regularly billing 100% of their time.

Tip: You don’t want billable utilization to hit 100% regularly. Maxing out billable utilization means employees don’t get time for professional development or to support the development of new service offerings. Plus, 100% billable utilization can lead to burnt-out employees, which isn’t good for you or them.

Billable utilization targets of 75-85% make sense, but your agency should also have a productive utilization target, and it should always be 100%.

In reality, you might rarely hit this 100% productive utilization target because your team still needs some time for non-billable admin work, like timesheets and updating the CRM. But striving for 100% productive utilization means you’re proactively planning for how your employees spend all of their time — even the time you can’t bill clients.

This prevents valuable time from going to waste and encourages you to strategically put this time to good use. The best agencies put this “extra” time toward smart investments into their futures.

The best digital services companies plan time for innovation and development

Digital services companies that proactively plan how employees spend all of their time can proactively set aside time to develop new service offerings, cross-train employees, and better invest in their people to create a healthier and happier culture. Here’s how.

Set aside time for innovation. To survive and remain relevant, every company needs to innovate. To innovate, companies must set aside time to evaluate which of their services:

• Are growing in demand (and which are declining)

• They can sell on their unique approach and experience (and not solely on price)

• Set them apart from competitors

This innovation work only happens when companies schedule time for it. Otherwise, day-to-day client needs take priority, and innovation falls to the backburner.

Assign your employees time to think about recent client projects and needs. Challenge them to identify needs that emerged during those projects that the company could build, sharpen, or expand their service offering around.

How can the company start taking steps to create these new or refreshed service offerings? Think beyond billable utilization to fully utilize your employees’ time to support company innovation and strategic growth.

Tip: Not all employees are cut out for innovation work. It’s important to understand the different roles different employees play at your agency. Consider each employee’s unique talents when determining how best to utilize their time fully. Check out our Explorers, Builders, and Teachers framework for one way to think about this.

Invest in your people. If you’re doing innovation work correctly, your teams will likely identify skill gaps at your agency. Your team will always need to be learning to deliver the next big strategy, methodology, or technology to clients. Investing in professional development is important not only to ensure your business has the talent it needs to succeed in the future but also because, without it, employees will likely become bored and disengaged. Today’s employees expect their employers to invest in their learning and growth.

Allocating time for managers to dedicate to the development of their people and for individual contributors to dedicate to training and courses, will help your business acquire the skill sets it needs for the future while keeping employees happy, growing, and engaged.

Factor professional development into your utilization plans and ensure the training and education you support aligns your people’s goals with the skills your business will need in the future.

When digital services companies allocate time to innovation and employee development, their business strategy is stronger, and they have a more talented workforce. These things support a better company that can attract more of the good work that everyone wants to be a part of — the work that supports the company’s strategic direction and is more rewarding for employees to work on.

It’s a positive, rewarding cycle that gives everyone a reason to celebrate: Invest in your business and your people, and attract and retain better employees and clients. Attract and retain better employees and clients, earn even better work. Your company can more intentionally create strategic growth when you strive for 100% productive utilization.

Utilization pitfalls to avoid

Before you rethink your approach to utilization, be mindful of the pitfalls many digital services companies fall into. Avoid these common mistakes to ensure you’re not using the metric in the wrong ways or for the wrong reasons

1. Getting carried away with non-billable projects

Sometimes when companies first start allocating their employees’ time to non-billable projects, they end up with too many or the wrong kind of projects. If they don’t pay attention, they can soon find themselves with numerous committees meeting to discuss initiatives that don’t have much impact on the business or employees (company picnic, anyone?).

This misalignment of priorities can lead to the backlog piling up and employees not billing enough of their time. Billable utilization and revenue targets get missed, and the company can’t invest in its future or its people as much as it needs to. Non-billable projects should always align with the company’s business strategy to support and elevate the company and its employees.

2. Using utilization as a lagging indicator

If you review your actual billable utilization weekly and then react to low numbers by pushing employees to bill more or work harder, you’re reacting too late. You’ll stress out employees and hurt your culture, but you won’t do much to improve utilization.

Instead, visibility into the sales pipeline can help your company proactively:

• Understand what work is coming.
• Assess whether the projected work is enough to hit billable utilization targets.
• Determine if you have enough people staffed to complete the work.

If your forecasted billable utilization is too low, you may need to step up marketing and business development efforts to win more work. If your projected billable utilization is too high, you may need to revisit your resourcing model and bring on more people to get the work done. Either way, you’ll know early enough to take an action that will make an appreciable difference.

3. Increasing billable utilization by stuffing meetings

One of the worst mistakes digital services companies make is increasing their billable utilization by sending employees to meetings they don’t need to participate in. They do this so they can charge more (and increase their employees’ billable utilization).

This practice isn’t good for anyone. Clients pay for time that didn’t generate any value. Employees are bored and annoyed because they’re in meetings they don’t need to be in. The company wastes valuable time it could instead allocate to identifying opportunities for company innovation or investing in employee skill development. Avoid this utilization pitfall at all costs and instead determine the root cause for low billable utilization — and fix it.

It’s time for digital services companies to plan how they will fully and productively utilize their employees to better support their professional development and the business’s growth. Companies that make good use of their employees’ non-billable time will stay relevant and competitive and create a work culture that attracts the best employees.

Use software that helps calculate utilization rate

Becoming a high-performing digital services company or consultancy doesn’t happen overnight. There will be inherent challenges tied to utilization targets, especially as your business scales. That’s expected. The savviest organizations, however, understand the nuanced nature of billable vs. productive utilization rates and plan for how employees spend all their time. This is how happy, healthy cultures are established and nurtured, no matter the stage of the business. Book a demo to learn how Parallax can not only help you avoid common utilization pitfalls but take control back when it comes to reaching your targets. 

FAQ

Nearly all decisions that leaders of digital service companies make rely on accurate insights and forecasts — but to gather those insights and create those forecasts, they need the right people, the right processes, and (definitely) the right tools in place to bring it all together. 

Today’s modern, strategic solutions can enable smooth, streamlined project management, resource planning, and forecasting for services organizations, allowing them to step away from their old school, often tedious approaches for collecting and monitoring business-critical insights. With the right tools in place, leaders can more easily elevate core practices and strategically drive the business forward by creating a cohesive, forward-looking view into how they operate.  

So, where to turn? How can you know which solution is best for you? 

There’s a lot of hype over platforms like Mavenlink (Kantata), a professional services automation (PSA) solution that centralizes operations and tools into one place to help services organizations optimize their project management and resource planning — but, in truth, every business will have a unique set of requirements and objectives that dictate which platform is right for them. 

We dive into the different PSA platforms and other alternatives available today – some that may be even better than Mavenlink (Kantata) – so stick around and scroll down to learn more. 

Table of Contents: Top Mavenlink (Kantata) Alternatives & Competitors 

5 Best Mavenlink Alternatives And Competitors To Consider 

Why do you need an alternative to Mavenlink (Kantata)? 

Key Features For A Strong Mavenlink (Kantata) Alternative

Top 5 Mavenlink (Kantata) Alternatives

• Parallax
• Wrike 
• monday.com
• OpenAir
• Teamwork 

Which Mavenlink (Kantata) Alternative will work best for you?

Why do you need an alternative to Mavenlink (Kantata)?

You need simple, straightforward pricing

If you’re a services company looking for sustainable growth, you should look for simple, straightforward pricing from your platform that doesn’t come with any surprises. When comparing solutions, ask how their pricing works. It’s not uncommon for all-in-one solutions, for example, to lead with one price to get folks in the door but then, to get their real value, it requires additional features, custom insights, and LOTS of training, which usually comes with additional, significant costs. There are platforms today that have fixed pricing for the duration of the project, access to all features, AND tied to billable resources where ROI is actually realized.

You need better planning capabilities

Some platforms have dashboards that don’t always enable the transparency and collaboration that teams want and need today. Services companies are looking for advanced resource planning and capacity forecasting capabilities that provide one source of truth by connecting to the CRM (sales pipeline) and Backlog (active projects). This provides a forward-looking shared view of performance and forecasts—because that’s how you plan. It’s all about less reactive planning and more proactive planning with a complete picture of the data, accessible in the right ways for all team members.

You need more integration options

Whenever possible, digital services companies want to avoid disruption to daily operations, that includes avoiding the need to rip and replace the tools and technologies their people have come to love and rely on. Many leaders today are seeking integration-first resource planning engines that can curate data from across the business for smarter decisions. Being able to leverage the tools you already have is certainly less disruptive, but it also costs less (even just considering hours) than adopting all new tools and allows for speed to value because you don’t need to learn a completely new toolset. Talk about a win-win-WIN! 

You want more customization

Getting trapped in workflows that require never-ending clicks to get to the information needed can quickly turn into a nightmare for people trying to make real-time decisions. Being able to personalize and customize workflows to create a view that works for you, no matter your role, not only makes these solutions more enjoyable to use but an incredibly valuable time saver. 

Key Features For A Strong Mavenlink (Kantata) Alternative

Integration-first 

Digital services companies want a platform that connects and leverages the tools their teams are already using such as CRM and timesheet tools. A platform that integrates with top CRM platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot, for example, means sales team members get the same experience they’re used to, but their deal and project data will flow directly into the platform for better visibility for resource planning, which helps improve utilization, project margin, and growth.

Approachable, predictable pricing 

Leaders need to have an understanding of a platform’s pricing structure straight away; they want tools without any hidden fees and that don’t charge for freelancers or non-billable users to use the tool. They want approachable, predictable pricing. 

Rapid adoption and implementation 

The implementation and adoption timelines for all-in-one tools can create massive disruptions to workflows and take months, even years, to get right. There are other tools that drive adoption and implementation in 90 days or less so that services organizations can unlock value from their investment quickly. (Yes, we’re talking about Parallax. ) 

Designed specifically for digital agencies and software development shops

Some platforms are designed for any type of company, while other platforms are designed specifically for digital agencies and software development shops. These businesses have different needs, unique workflows, and they move fast—and their tools need to do the same. 

Top 5 Mavenlink (Kantata) Alternatives

1. Parallax

Parallax takes a different approach than monolithic, all-in-one PSA tools on the market. A purpose-built platform for digital services companies, specifically agencies and software development studios, Parallax leverages native integrations for the best-in-class tools that are already in use, all to deliver a forward-looking view into the business that enables better resource management, tighter operations, and stronger performance. 

Parallax is a team of industry experts dedicated to removing friction points and solving business challenges for services companies, and the platform proves it — it provides shared visibility across the business, creating centralized insights to inform conversations on hiring, resource allocation, and much more. And the outcome? Everyone will be empowered to make more strategic decisions that can positively impact performance and forecasting and, ultimately, drive measurable growth.

5 reasons why Parallax is the best Mavenlink (Kantata) alternative 

• Rapid adoption: Parallax is committed to driving adoption and implementation in 90 days or less.
• Additive to existing tech stack: Parallax works with your existing tools and technology and doesn’t disrupt any current workflows. 
• Automatic integrations: Parallax provides automatic integration of sales pipeline data to enable deeper scenario planning for leaders. 
• Predictable pricing: Parallax delivers a sense of pricing from the very first conversations, and there are no hidden fees for consulting or integrations. In other words, pricing is locked.
• Ongoing consulting: Parallax keeps its champions connected to customers as often as they want, ensuring everyone is getting as much value as possible from the platform.

2. Wrike

An easy-to-use tool, Wrike streamlines the internal project management and collaboration processes across teams. The platform focuses on the accomplishment of tasks rather than entire projects, offering workflow customization for companies to make processes more company- or industry-specific. It’s built to streamline proofing and reporting for marketing campaigns, to more easily develop creative assets and have them routed through approvals quickly, and to support project managers more easily track deadlines and deliver results. Wrike offers various plans with different pricing structures depending on the company’s needs. 

3. monday.com

Monday is a comprehensive platform that’s designed to help teams manage their entire workflow within a single digital workspace. It’s a project management software that helps to increase transparency and visibility within day-to-day operations—it automates repetitive tasks, enhances team collaboration, and creates visibility in workflows. Teams can use the platform to manage all projects, but they can also use it as a CRM, to manage ad campaigns, or even to manage video production. Monday has various plans available depending on the company’s needs. 

 4. OpenAir

An extension of Oracle’s NetSuite ERP, OpenAir is an all-in-one cloud-based professional services automation platform for a wide array of services businesses. The platform provides integrated time tracking, project management, resource management, expense tracking, and invoicing – offering a single platform to run a services organization. OpenAir’s global customers all use the same version and codebase, with options for configurability and customization. Migration and adoption of this all-in-one ERP platform can often take 6-12 months to fully implement.

5. Teamwork

Teamwork is a project management tool focused on collaboration by providing key features such as instant chat. It makes resource management simple by providing a view of everything in one place for the team, clients, and freelancers. Teamwork has advanced features for time tracking, budgeting, and resource allocation. It integrates with companies’ other project applications, such as the CRM platform, and automates repetitive tasks with straightforward workflows. 

Which Mavenlink (Kantata) Alternative will work best for you?

There’s a long list of stand-out applications and next-generation tools available today for digital services organizations, and choosing the one that’s best for your business can feel overwhelming. What’s important to remember in your search is that your project management and resource planning solution should be just as dynamic as your business. Your platform should grow as you grow, and it should work for you and with you, not against you—because thoughtful, strategic growth is hard enough. 

Parallax was built specifically for digital services companies and informed by top industry leaders. We’re a driven team that’s ready to solve operational challenges and deliver better insights for purposeful growth… so, if you have questions, know that we’re here to help. 

We’re always happy to chat and share more about the Parallax approach and help you decide whether it’s the right tool for you and your business.

We covered why utilization and project margin are the two most important KPIs that digital services organizations need to prioritize. We went a little deeper into how to protect project margins during economic uncertainty, and now, let’s explore how to drive utilization without burning out your teams. 

Digital services organizations have a mountain of priorities, from delivering projects to winning new business and growing the team. One critical component to doing all of this successfully is understanding the organization’s utilization benchmark, and planning the business to consistently hit that target.  

Utilization – one of the two key metrics that matter most – is a measurement of a team member’s total time spent on billable projects versus the total billable time available. High utilization indicates that an organization is efficiently using the capacity of its team, meaning team members are meeting or exceeding their billability targets. Low utilization means team members aren’t meeting their billability targets and have available time to dedicate to projects. 

Every organization is tasked with optimizing and stabilizing utilization. While pushing utilization higher and higher may seem great from a financial perspective, it is likely to result in team burnout and isn’t sustainable over time. When utilization drops too low, it means the team is losing out on additional revenue opportunity, which limits organizations from maximizing their financial potential. Having a clear view of utilization is important – in fact, it’s critical – to moving up the maturity model from a heroic organization to a strategic business. 

Utilization 101: Let’s cover the basics  

One big, consistent challenge for delivery leads is managing performance expectations from sales and leadership without overworking their teams or losing resources to attrition. They need to get ahead of issues like low or high utilization, and having a confident sense of current and future utilization is a key metric they need to watch. To do so, they need the right toolset and operations cadence to effectively track utilization and easily report across the organization. This is a tall order, especially if the business is unclear on its utilization benchmark. 

When we say utilization benchmark, we’re talking about that “sweet spot.” Every organization will be different – and every role will be different – but generally, you should aim to be as close to 100% without burning people out. This typically translates to a target benchmark of around 75–85%, leaving room for team members to complete admin work, jump in on new or quick-turn projects as they arise, or support company-specific initiatives while still allocating the majority of their time to billable projects. 

Importantly, leaders need to be careful not to put too much emphasis on utilization on a daily or weekly basis, as employees can become disengaged, dissatisfied, and resentful if leaders focus on just that. Team leads should encourage employees to focus on how best to deliver value while promoting the benefits of healthy utilization at all levels of the organization. 

How to identify the root causes of utilization challenges   

We already covered how to identify the root causes of poor margin performance (i.e., sales oversight, resourcing misalignment, unrealistic project expectations), now let’s do the same for utilization! Challenges with utilization can be attributed to one (or both) of two root causes:

1. Poor capacity planning and resource forecasting 
2. Misalignment between resource management and delivery 

Read on to dive further into the attributes of each root cause and how to successfully address them.

Root challenge #1: There’s a capacity planning and resource forecasting problem.

If your utilization rates are off, your supply versus demand forecasting process might be broken. In Parallax, this would appear in utilization reporting as such: If utilization is too low, you will have more billable capacity than you have work to deliver (blue line), and if it’s too high, you’ll have more work to deliver than billable capacity. This discrepancy will show up in analysis that compares total planned hours (blue line) versus total billable capacity (yellow line).

If digital services companies are consistently missing their utilization benchmark, one of these capacity and resource forecasting challenges could be the culprit: 

The team closed less new business than expected (less demand).

• Challenge: How can you get more precise with sales forecasting so that you can more accurately predict the demand for resources being generated by your pipeline? Are you losing deals because your prices are too high compared to your competitors? (This would likely show up in your performance metrics as high project margin % and low utilization.)
• Solution: Sell more work to new customers. This is the most obvious fix if you have more capacity than you do work. When you bring in more projects, you’re going to increase demand for your team members, and your supply and demand will naturally start to more closely align.

The team forecasted less work with your existing customers than you expected (less demand).

• Challenge: Forecasting business with your existing customers is just as important as it is for new business. You need a clear understanding of both to inform your resourcing plan and help balance utilization rates.
• Solution: Proactively forecast work for your existing customers. By better forecasting work with your current customers, you’ll find a clearer picture of team capacity in the coming months.

Growing the team too quickly (too much supply).

• Challenge: Maybe you have exactly as much business as you expected and you’re still experiencing lower than expected Utilization. Have you hired new team members recently? You may have hired additional team members too soon and inflated your capacity when you did not have the work forecasted to meet that capacity. 
• Solution: Use data-driven methodologies to facilitate conversations around growing the team. Within Parallax, you can easily access the data required to determine when and for which roles you need to hire. 

Root challenge #2: The delivery team is delivering less work than was scoped and planned.

Alternatively, if there is no discrepancy between planned hours for the team and their total billable capacity, the issue likely might be that your delivery team is actualizing fewer hours than what was originally scoped and/or planned. Things like revenue leakage or even over-efficient delivery can cause utilization dips. This is what that looks like in Parallax: 

And here are some reasons that could happen: 

Revenue leakage.

• Challenge: The team billed fewer hours than what was budgeted for a time and materials (T&M) project. In this scenario, the team is leaving money on the table, and utilization (as well as revenue) will suffer as a result.  
• Solution: Burn Against Budget Projections, often referred to as “Estimate at Complete” (EAC), should be used to understand where the team is expected to land in terms of burn against budget for a project. For T&M projects, a low EAC means that the team is forecasted to burn fewer hours than expected and miss the opportunity to bill for pre-budgeted hours. 

Efficient delivery (i.e., fixed-fee projects).

• Challenge: The team is delivering fixed-fee projects more efficiently than expected, which is great! However, this is causing gaps in utilization that need to be addressed. 
• Solution: Keep the fixed-fee rates the same if the service is selling well, and decrease your hour estimates for those projects to reflect the effort that’s truly required. The team would then be able to spend that saved time working on other billable work and generating more revenue for the business.

Delayed delivery.

• Challenge: Delayed projects prevented the team from working on the projects that they had originally planned to be working on. 
• Solution: Easier said than done … BUT, proactively identifying and mitigating project risks that might prevent your team from working on billable work during the expected time period can solve this challenge. Additionally, when this does happen and can’t be avoided, scan the rest of your projects to understand if those team members could instead bill to other projects during the project delay.

Closing the gap 

Simply understanding the delta between planned work and total billable capacity gives confidence and power back to delivery team leads who are tasked with hitting this benchmark. Luckily, the right resourcing tool can make this entire process seamless and stress-free. 

Before, with disparate spreadsheets and tracking processes, delivery leads could be left pulling utilization and capacity data from all over the place, which becomes a very manual, time-consuming process – and worse yet, it’s a reactive activity… if it’s done at all. With Parallax, tracking utilization becomes a proactive process as all necessary data already lives within the platform, thanks to our integration capabilities. Reporting becomes automated, and with just a few clicks, our customers can view real-time utilization metrics and forecasted utilization from one central source, and proactively address any expected speed bumps. 

Let’s chat 

We understand that there’s a lot that goes into tracking both utilization and project margin, and when economic uncertainty continues to rear its head, it can feel overwhelming. Not to worry, though—we’re here to help. 

What’s key to remember is that you shouldn’t hyper-fixate on just one of these metrics, otherwise the other one will suffer. If you want to scale your business in a healthy way, we highly recommend prioritizing utilization AND project margin together, as they naturally fuel scalable revenue growth. It’s the flywheel for success with digital services organizations.

Reach out to learn more about how Parallax can empower you and your teams with the insights you need to navigate whatever comes your way.

Want to learn more about utilization? Check out our Founder and CEO Tom O’Neill’s previous blog! He covers best practices for tracking utilization metrics effectively, how forecasting can help better predict utilization and more.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Digital services companies like agencies and software development firms are constantly on the roller coaster of too much work or not enough – or too many people or too few to actually do that work!  The common question becomes, “Should we just buy pizza and beg everyone to stay late for the next couple of weeks or pull the trigger and hire more help?!”  ‍

It’s a tough balancing act to bring in enough new business to hit targets, have just the right amount of talent on staff to deliver great results, and keep teams happy and engaged. And oscillating between the ebbs and flows of selling – and profitably delivering – digital services can become tense and messy when people are the product. It leads to reactive decision-making driven by emotion and instinct. We get it, and it’s a tension we see in services companies every day. 

But it doesn’t have to be like this! And we believe data is the one ingredient necessary to reduce this volatility. The right data – visible across the organization – can remove emotion and bring more confidence in decision-making and forecasting. Because without accurate data, companies will continue to struggle to get a clear picture of what’s happening across the business, what’s coming down the pipeline, and what they need to do to balance the needs of the business with the needs of their people. Data informs better forecasting, which drives performance and stronger operations.  

Here’s how to use data and accurate forecasting to exit the roller coaster. 

1. Get visibility into the sales pipeline

Accurate forecasting all starts with visibility into the sales pipeline. Without visibility, there’s no way to know what’s being sold, whether those opportunities are enough to hit financial and operational targets (revenue, margin, utilization), and if you have the right people available to do the work. Sales pipeline data is necessary for all types of business planning, including sales forecasting, revenue forecasting, and resource management for digital services companies. 

Unfortunately, most have sales pipeline data locked in the CRM, and it’s not easily shared or visible to operations and delivery teams. And if they don’t have visibility into key data points from the pipeline, they won’t have the necessary context for effective resource planning. They’ll struggle to predict whether they have enough or just the right number of people, in the right roles, to successfully deliver projects. 

Plus, new opportunities rarely match resource availability. A lack of visibility often leads to a chaotic and reactive scramble of trying to get the work done with whoever is available at the time — regardless of whether those people are the best fit for the job. Shared sales pipeline data is the first step to creating forecasts that improve business performance.

2. Don’t let precision get in the way of accuracy (or at least consistency)

If sales pipeline visibility is fundamental to business forecasting, keeping the pipeline’s data up-to-date is critical for accurate forecasts. This is understandably challenging for most companies, because data management often falls behind other sales priorities, such as generating new business, serving existing clients well, and making sure the business development team is healthy. 

The good news is that salespeople don’t need to put together detailed project or resource plans right away,  but they can provide directionally correct data early on and add higher fidelity along the way. More insight is always more valuable than nothing at all. Enforcing data governance can feel like too strict of a requirement and a waste of time, but in reality, regularly updating CRM data will create accurate forecasts that will improve your business performance, making it easier to win good work, serve clients well, and promote positive communication and collaboration between teams. 

We recommend adopting these sales operations best practices to keep CRM data current. Without accurate and up-to-date data, forecasts are, at best, inaccurate and useless; at worst, they could lead to the wrong decisions. 

3. Implement professional services automation that enables smarter forecasting

Are you piecing together disparate data sources into spreadsheets and trying (but struggling) to use them for sales forecasting, resource planning, and revenue forecasting? One of the main reasons we built Parallax is because we know the pain of outgrowing homegrown tools and processes. If your spreadsheets or custom-built tools have become too clunky, cumbersome, and easily prone to breaking, it’s likely because you’ve reached a growth point where you can’t just wing it and count on your team’s gut instinct and brilliance. You need visibility into real-time data and up-to-date forecasts. But big, clunky tools and ERPs involve too much change and adoption. 

Parallax brings your tools and data into one place, so you can create a shared perspective on performance, drive better operations, and leverage data for strategic decision-making. Our integrations-first philosophy means less disruption for sales and delivery teams. They can keep using best-in-class CRM or project management tools. But Parallax augments these great platforms with reporting and insights built specifically to help services companies drive smarter operations, unlock better forecasting, and improve business performance. 

4. Forecast against targets and compare to benchmarks

Once your data is in one place and you’ve adopted the habits needed to keep everything accurate and reliable, you can unlock the power of real-time forecasts. These forecasts help leaders make smart, impactful decisions in support of their business and people. Use the software you chose for real-time forecasting and resource planning  (we’re completely unbiased about which one ) to see how you’re performing on a variety of financial and operational metrics. Compare your performance against industry benchmarks and adopt the best practices necessary to optimize performance.

Not sure where to start? Check out the two KPIs that matter for digital services companies. 

5. Make informed decisions that optimize operations and drive business performance

Now that your teams have access to accurate, real-time forecasts, it’s time to use that information to make decisions driven by data rather than emotion. Accurate and reliable forecasts allow for more proactive decision-making, giving your team time to staff projects in a way that allows for growth opportunities for employees and healthy resource management. 

You might want to build forecasts that help you:

• Inform resource planning, making it easier to decide when it makes sense to hire (and who to hire) to ensure project success.
• Identify dips in the sales pipeline so you can act accordingly to generate new opportunities.
• Adjust in-progress project plans based on how you’re performing on key metrics.

When you have confidence in your forecasts, your team can make more confident decisions and investments in the future — avoiding the chaotic scramble of the “too much work, not enough work” roller coaster.

Scale the magic that makes you great

You’ve reached a point where accurate data and forecasting are vital to future growth when you can no longer rely on gut instinct to make decisions. It’s a bittersweet problem, but adopting best practices related to resource planning, forecasting, and data governance gives everyone more time to focus on their craft and scale the magic that makes your company great.

At this growth point, your teams must break free from siloed thinking and create a shared perspective. When your team leads can get quick access to accurate forecasting, they can make strategic decisions supporting the business and its people. To learn more about how Parallax brings together data from across the business for better planning and forecasting, get in touch for an assessment of where you’re at and where you want to be.

We covered why utilization and project margin are the two most important KPIs that digital services organizations need to prioritize. Now, let’s dive a little deeper with specific tips on how to protect, and even improve, project margins. 

Economic uncertainty is causing business leaders to become more conservative with their resources. A looming recession, layoffs across tech sectors, and shrinking budgets mean digital services companies need to optimize their performance and maximize their resources without burning people out. It’s imperative to ensure sales and delivery teams are aligned on what it takes to deliver work profitably and to democratize project financial data so that delivery teams can manage projects proactively to meet financial targets.

In today’s environment, managing to margin and making sure that teams are executing profitably is key.

First, identify the root cause of poor project margins

Knowing that your project margins are lacking is one thing, but in order to improve them, you need to be able to identify the root cause(s) of the issue. There are three usual suspects when it comes to poor project margins: sales oversight, resourcing misalignment, and irresponsible project execution. 

Sales oversight: All too often, digital services companies become hyper-focused on sales and revenue growth, causing them to lose track of what it takes to deliver projects profitably. When this tunnel vision sets in, organizations tend to drive down their bill rate in an effort to win as much work as possible – and project margins will inevitably sink.

Is your organization prioritizing revenue growth over delivery quality and profit margins? Are you lacking visibility into what your forecasted margins will be for proposed projects? If so, sales oversight is likely the root cause of your poor project margins. 

Resourcing misalignment: We all know that the availability and capacity of team members can change in the blink of an eye in the digital services world. Let’s say a new project was priced based on a team you thought would be available, but when you get to the point of staffing the project, none of the junior staffers originally slated for the work have available capacity to take on the project. Your options are to leverage more senior staff with higher bill rates or leverage a contractor pool, which is almost always going to cost more than the junior staffers you originally had in mind.

Without adequate resource planning or visibility into current and projected availability of lower-cost resources, the costs will creep higher, and your project margins will take a hit. Sound familiar? 

Unrealistic project expectations: The first two scenarios showcase how project margins can be lower than targets without anything to do with project execution. Yet, almost always, poor project margins are blamed on the project management team. Even if the project was set up for failure, due to resource swapping and sales misalignment, it’s often the assumption that overages are a result of the project manager not running projects efficiently. My father taught me at a young age that golf wagers are won and lost on the first tee, where golfers negotiate strokes based on handicaps. The same can be said about negotiating your scope, budget, and bill rates before kicking off a project.

When projects are set up for success from a planning perspective, then the root cause of the issues may in fact lie with the delivery team. When the project team doesn’t have the appropriate tools to proactively monitor and manage project financials, project managers by default take on a “do what we need to do to get the project done” approach. It becomes more about trying to keep the customer happy and getting the project completed and less about paying attention to the economics of the project. The team burns out in the process and at the end of the project, the organization ends up losing money. 

Are you running into extensive project overages, regularly overworking the team, and exhausting all other resources for projects that were planned responsibly (i.e. responsible sales and resourcing)? Unrealistic project expectations are likely your root cause for poor project margins.

How to mitigate project margin challenges and improve operations 

After the root cause(s) impacting project margins have been identified, it’s then time to implement best practices across the organization to course correct. Here are a few tried-and-true practices that we’ve seen work well for digital services organizations to not only mitigate margin challenges but also to mature their operations. 

Build more rigor into the sales and resource planning process: Data from CRM platforms, or resource and staffing plans, often exists in silos. A consequence of this locked-up data is that sales teams seldom have visibility into the project backlog which impacts when and how the work they’re selling can be delivered. Delivery teams, on the other hand, lack visibility into the sales pipeline and struggle to balance workloads and make data-driven staffing decisions.

A more mature approach includes regular touchpoints between sales and delivery leads to look at sales pipeline data – so both have a clear sense of what’s in the pipeline and resource availability for upcoming work.

In order for the sales pipeline and resource forecasting process to be achievable, sales needs a simple way to attach high level resource plans to the deals they are pricing so everyone has a sense of what it’ll take to deliver work and meet margin goals. 

Parallax delivers more confidence, accuracy, and alignment for sales and delivery teams. By integrating with leading CRMs, sales leaders can leverage service offering templates as a firm starting point when pricing and planning new deals. And delivery and operations teams have a clear understanding of what’s being sold and can work proactively to earmark or assign the right resources – at the right bill rates – to execute the work, manage expectations, and meet margin goals. Parallax helps answer questions like: Who has the capacity to take on new work and who doesn’t? Which teams are already heavily utilized and which aren’t? Do we have the right mix of resources if we close the majority of our pipeline? 

Put project financials front and center: If your projects are planned with the right economics – with the right resources and for the right amount of time – then any challenges with project margins are likely going to be stemming from project delivery itself. If that’s the case, here are a few course-correcting steps to consider: 

• Democratize project financials: Automate reporting around project burn against budget so the team has real-time visibility into the burn of in-progress projects. Better yet, leverage resource planning and project actuals together to forecast planned burn against budget in the future. With real-time reporting and forecasting for project financials, there should be no surprises when it comes to finalizing project financials for projects. Let’s say a project was scoped for $90K over three months, but after one month, the team has burned through more than half the budget. If this pace was unexpected, the lead or project manager then has the opportunity to reset and scale back with the team to better align with remaining budget OR proactively communicate with the customer to request a change order or an increase in budget. 
• Incentivize fiscally responsible sales and project management: Sales teams and project managers have the greatest influence over whether or not projects are executed profitably. Create accountability in your organization for team members selling and managing projects. 
• Dig deeper into delivery challenges: If overages continue, dive a little deeper and investigate where additional challenges may be lurking: 
  • Is it a certain offering where margins are low (website development, SEO offering, etc.)? 
  • Is a certain role within the team burning more hours than expected (engineering, UX designers, marketing strategists, etc.)? 
  • Are there certain team members who are consistently actualizing more hours than planned?
  • Are there variances in project margins with the different billing models (fixed fee vs retainer vs time & materials)?

Connect with Parallax 

What’s key to overcoming any of the challenges we laid out above is having a technical architecture that can provide greater visibility into the key metrics to the business so that the team is enabled to make data-driven decisions about the business. By using data and insights to understand where the problems are stemming from, you can then start to proactively address the inefficiencies and get margins back on track before they take a larger toll on company performance. This is how digital services companies mature their operations to effectively meet margin targets. 

Even more, being able to calculate and forecast these metrics is a foundational capability for digital services organizations. If you’re not able to baseline where your organization is performing in each of these areas today – or forecast where you expect to land in the coming months – that’s absolutely OK. And that’s why we’re here! Parallax is built to help you gain an understanding of where you are today so you can develop a game plan to get to where you want to be. 

Connect with us today to learn how some simple steps and connections across sales and delivery practices can help protect project margins – no matter the economic conditions. 

In this article, we will discuss the importance of decoupling resource and project management in digital services companies to create more efficient processes and prevent burnout. We’ll explore the pitfalls of task-based planning and the advantages of implementing a duration-based approach.

Key Takeaways:

• Task-based planning is difficult to scale and too granular for growing digital services companies, leading to inefficiencies and burnout.
• Duration-based planning reduces context-switching time, saves costs, and eases timesheet stress.
• Decoupling resource and project management leads to more streamlined operations, shared responsibility, and fewer surprises, enabling companies to scale more effectively.
• Parallax, a resource planning tool, supports duration-based planning and helps project managers and resource managers collaborate for more successful projects.

There are a million factors to consider and align on when scaling a digital services company. Far too often, as these companies expand their teams, processes and systems quickly become fragmented and muddled. The work itself starts to feel more like a game of Tetris than a strategy.

The people who bear the brunt of fragmented processes are the project managers who are expected to be the central hub for the team, resources, projects, and individual tasks.

Project managers must balance resource and project management. They’re held accountable when timelines aren’t on track and are expected to have the expertise to understand how a project is progressing. They’re also on the hook for project health assessments based on the burn-down in tasks and the burn-down in budget. In other words, it’s a lot.

As a company grows, the combination of a traditional task-based approach for project management and resource planning leaves project managers with a next-to-impossible role. 

They’re expected to not only keep all the plates spinning within complex projects that often have hundreds of tasks or points (if not more), but they also have to figure out how to allocate human resources for future work. It’s simply not scalable.

How about—and just hear us out—we don’t break our beloved project managers? Let’s dive into our recommendations for successfully scaling your business without burning out project managers or anyone else within your organization.

Table of Contents

• The Pitfalls of Task-Based Planning
• The Solution: Duration-Based Planning
• The Importance of Decoupling Resource and Project Management

The Pitfalls of Task-Based Planning

First, let’s cover task-based planning and pricing. This is when teams break down each project into a series of tasks and subtasks and estimate how much time it will take people to complete each task.

They then assign a fee to each task based on the billable rate of the person assigned to it. Finally, they total everything up to determine the overall project budget.

This might sound standard, but in practice, task-based management is a dated approach that comes with various challenges for digital services companies.

It’s Difficult to Scale

In the early stages of a company, it’s easy to have a small group of people share the responsibility for a small body of work. Each person has a sense of responsibility, and everyone is pitching in when it comes to dividing and conquering the work. 

Shifting that responsibility across larger teams and more clients, however, can be difficult. Again, this leaves project managers to manage complex projects and tasks, while also figuring out future resourcing needs. It’s far too much ownership and responsibility for one role. 

It’s Too Granular

Task-based workflows are incredibly time-consuming because they focus on individual tasks at a granular level and in 15-minute increments of time.

When the client list starts to expand—or the project size starts to grow—there can be hundreds of individual contributors and a lot of overhead and time to rigidly manage if everyone’s tasks are tracked in small increments.

Plus, this typically goes against the grain of creative practitioners. Don’t expect them to happily bounce through hundreds of small tasks in 15-minute allotments with peak creativity for each.

It Doesn’t Account for Context Switching

It’s difficult for a project to land perfectly on budget through a rigid task-by-task approach, as it quickly becomes expensive for individual contributors to switch between projects. 

The often unexpected, unaccounted cost for context switching across six or seven different projects and clients tends to kill some of the time allocated for each task. Designers or developers, for example, might have to spend 15-30 minutes getting back up to speed when they switch from one project to another, and they’re doing this multiple times a day.

That time has to go somewhere. It’s either chipping away from their work time, or it ends up killing the budget. This forces teams to eat the overages (sacrificing margin) or increase client budgets. Neither is ideal.

The Solution: Duration-Based Planning

In place of task-based planning, digital services companies should implement duration-based planning. This is when a certain percentage of each role or a person’s time is allotted to client projects. 

Rather than assigning a certain amount of time for each task, duration-based management assumes the employee will spend, for example, 50% of their time on a project for client C and 50% on client D. 

The expectation is that the employee will complete all the tasks they’re responsible for during that time, and communicate with their manager or project owner if they need a longer window. Project managers can still manage the individual tasks or points that need to be addressed and completed, but budgets are not dictated based on the roll-up of the small allocations of time across all of these individual elements.

We highly recommend that people only work on two or three clients in a day, otherwise they’re too easily bogged down by checklists and short-sighted tasks that break the budget. 

Say someone is assigned 30 tasks (or points), and the sum of the hours on all those items is 200 hours. That person has 200 hours of billable work to complete within perfectly timed tasks that are aligned with the budget. 

Again, what about the time it takes for context switching? Where does this person put the time it takes to ramp up on each new task if they’re juggling more than two or three clients? That extra time impacts the budget.

However, with a duration-based planning approach, companies significantly reduce context-switching time. They can start being more thoughtful about how time is spent—and ultimately set their teams up to win.

Additional Benefits of Duration-Based Planning

There are other benefits of the duration-based approach beyond cost and time savings. A large portion of today’s workforce is feeling burnt out. This feeling is exacerbated within digital services companies that often have an always-on mentality. 

Essentially, everyone is working way harder than they should be, but it’s not always reflected in their timesheets. Developers, designers, and other individual contributors could be feeling overworked and stressed out, yet their billable utilization could say 60%. 

With a task-based approach, these individuals are likely to hide time to avoid the backlash from project managers for going over the allotted time and budget. It’s a lose-lose situation for both the contributor and the project manager. This type of environment eventually impacts a company’s attrition rate. However, a duration-based planning approach can help ease that timesheet stress.

The Importance of Decoupling Resource and Project Management

Duration-based planning is a step in the right direction, but digital services companies should also be decoupling resource and project management. They should sell and plan work based on duration, not tasks, and create more checks and balances as projects are in flight to set project managers up for success and help teams stay on track. 

When these two operational elements are conflated, teams become heavily reliant on the project manager, expecting them to be a unicorn who can estimate time and budget for the work and hold people accountable to those estimates. 

Unfortunately, there’s rarely a discussion at the end of the week to assess how many tasks are left versus how much time and budget is left in the resource plan. If those weekly checkpoints don’t occur, there are often surprises as projects wrap up.

For example, you may find that teams are frustrated, budgets have been blown, or deliverables have fallen short. On the other hand, a micromanagement approach to ensure everything and everyone is on track is not sustainable for project managers or scalable for the business. Strong talent will burn out quickly, and employees will likely search for a new role or a new company sooner rather than later. 

An Example of Decoupling Resource and Project Management 

Here’s what it can look like when project management and resource planning are decoupled. The project manager sets expectations for three team members to work 50% of their time on the project from date A to date B. 

There’s a clear expectation and agreement that these team members can complete their tasks in that period of time. The project manager checks at least once a week to see which tasks are completed and which tasks are coming up. They will also regularly assess if the tasks left are reasonable for the time and budget left. 

This checks/balances approach essentially creates a mechanism for greater visibility and consistency, shared responsibility, reduced tension, and fewer surprises. Ideally, there would also be someone (i.e., a resource manager) for the project manager to partner with who can own resource adjustments for the project as needed, so the project manager can remain focused on the project itself. 

With this approach, digital services organizations can scale easily and start to operate at a more mature, streamlined level that doesn’t break their people. To do this, you must adopt a duration-based project approach and decouple project management and resource planning. 

Improve Project Management & Scale Your Business With Parallax

We’re passionate about this because we’ve lived it. We believe duration-based planning is a best practice for operationally mature organizations. Duration-based resource planning helps teams stay focused on a few projects at a time while delivering more value to clients. As a result, resource managers can easily visualize resource allocation and project managers can deliver more value. It’s truly a win-win.

While Parallax supports various pricing and agency resource management methods, our solution works especially well with duration-based planning. Resource planning features allow teams to assign a percentage of each employee’s time to a project. This makes it easy to visualize resource allocation. 

At the same time, project managers can continually watch for shifts in project variance by looking at projected start and end dates, the burn-down in tasks, and the estimated time to complete the projects. If things start to get off track, project managers and resource managers can act quickly and strategically, together. 

Are you looking to scale with ease? Do you want to create an environment for your workforce that has less friction and more success? Parallax can help. Book a free demo today!

We all lean on technology both in our personal and professional lives to solve problems and make life easier.

It’s everywhere and part of everything, from finding the perfect app that allows you to better track your budget or organize your recipes, to implementing a new system or adopting a new platform that will streamline processes and increase revenue. Whatever outcome we’re reaching for, it’s well understood that technology can help get us to where we want to be.  

Selecting enterprise technology, however, holds much more weight than stumbling upon a new app. Even as the volume of technology purchases increases every year, many buyers are getting important elements of the evaluation process wrong. You might think practice would make perfect, but data shows that’s not the case—most organizations aren’t doing a great job of thoroughly evaluating software, and they’re missing the mark on the solution that best suits their needs. 

According to Gartner, 48% of technology purchases are ad hoc, meaning the team’s requirements and objectives are not well understood, and another 52% of technology purchases are either canceled or abandoned before they get off the ground. Worse yet, only 20% of buyers achieve a high-quality deal and feel strongly that they did not have to compromise their ambitions.

These numbers are bleak, but frankly, they’re completely avoidable. When you better understand and align on the outcomes your organization is truly reaching for, the evaluation process for a new solution becomes infinitely easier (and even kind of fun).  

Introducing the ‘outcome chain’ framework

At Parallax and in past lives, we’ve made our fair share of technology purchase decisions. Plus, we are – after all – in the technology business, so we’ve learned a thing or two about the key questions and considerations you should think through before you make a large investment in a new solution for your business. At Parallax, we subscribe to the ‘outcome chain’ framework, originally developed by the Technology & Services Industry Association (TSIA). It’s a methodology that enables effective outcomes engineering, which is focused on consistently helping customers achieve targeted business outcomes at scale. This, of course, requires a complete understanding of what’s required to achieve a specific outcome, which is defined in the outcomes chain. The same concept applies to buyers evaluating software—they should be aware of what’s truly required to achieve the outcomes they’ve identified as well as the outcomes that providers are promising throughout the sales cycle. 

Yes, it’s essential to understand what a platform or solution can do, but what else needs to be done? What other operational changes need to be implemented in order for the solution to perform? Say an organization’s main objective is to increase their utilization by 5%—to achieve desired results, this will almost always require more than just a software purchase.

Laying everything out in an outcome chain framework provides structure to the evaluation process, ultimately helping buyers and their providers identify the key ingredients required to successfully deliver the right outcomes. 

Putting the outcome chain methodology to work 

There are several different elements of the outcome chain framework to think through and document when evaluating different systems and solutions. Let’s dive in! 

1. Outcome: To avoid embarking on a journey where the path ahead is unclear and the requirements for success are unknown, it’s essential to first identify and capture what outcomes you want to achieve and what’s required to achieve them. Are you focused on improving utilization? Increasing project profit margins? Achieving scalable revenue growth? Align on the intended outcomes, then have these conversations with your potential providers as well. They also need to have confidence that the holistic plan is attainable and that everyone understands the elements that might need to shift or evolve so that the solution can deliver on its promises. 
2. Financial Impact: What benefits is the solution going to provide, and what’s the expected financial impact of those benefits? The financial impact is tied directly to the outcome. How much is this going to cost? Do other required operational changes have an associated fee? Answering these questions is how you establish the expected ROI.
3. Operating KPIs: Once you’ve aligned on intended outcomes, you need to establish the key performance indicators (KPIs) for tracking against them. These are the early indicators you’ll use to understand your likelihood of achieving your goals. What systems or reports are we going to use to track our progress? What other factors will impact our likelihood of achieving our goals? How can we measure and monitor those additional factors? What metrics matter most? When you establish answers to these questions in your evaluation journey, you’ll always be prepared to answer stakeholders’ questions throughout the implementation process. 
4. Practices: Other day-to-day practices that might need to shift when a new platform is adopted are often overlooked, and that needs to change. What processes and best practices will need to be adopted in order to effectively leverage the software? How big is the gap between what we’re doing today, and what is required to achieve an outcome? What support am I going to be provided in establishing new processes? Who’s accountable? This is all part of creating a holistic solution in order to achieve outcomes. 
5. Technology: Though easier said than done, it’s important not to get distracted by one-off features and functionalities that aren’t relevant to your outcome. In other words, focus is key. What technology needs to be implemented to achieve the outcome? What’s included with the solution but isn’t required to achieve the value you’re pursuing? Am I disrupting a process that doesn’t need to be disrupted? How much change management is required? While more features could sound like a good thing, it’s important to consider the resources you will need to invest in adopting those features (i.e., training, change management, data migration, risk mitigation). When in doubt, remember that the simplest path to an outcome is most often the best path. 
6. Roles: The people component of any organizational change cannot be forgotten. Who needs to be involved? What changes will be required for my people? Will there be resistance? The solution needs to speak to the strategic goals that leadership is focused on, but it also needs to consider the logistical, operational requirements of the teams using the technology day in and day out. A rip-and-replace approach, for example, might not be the best option if teams are passionate about their current tools. Instead, the business might want to consider a solution that integrates with existing systems and that can 1) still achieve outcomes and 2) doesn’t cause widespread, unnecessary disruption and frustration across the organization. 

Let’s connect!

We understand that evaluating different tools and technologies for your business can feel overwhelming, confusing, and time-consuming. But with the outcome chains framework, those stressors go away. It’s a helpful approach that should be leveraged when making any software decision as it supports teams in covering and considering every aspect of the process so they can achieve their outcomes with ease. 

That’s why we use this same philosophy and approach when we partner with customers. Because adopting a Professional Services Automation solution is all about driving business outcomes – like better revenue, increased margin, and strategic growth. When you partner with Parallax, you not only get a powerful PSA solution built to meet the unique needs of digital agencies, marketing, and software development firms, you get ongoing access to a team of industry experts who are committed to helping you achieve the outcomes that matter to you. We’re there to support you every step of the way, probing you with important questions and ensuring that no stone is left unturned when making big decisions that have great impact on your business. 

“I must also say that working with the people at Parallax during implementation was a great experience. The team was informative and responsive. Because of Parallax’s consultative approach, I feel we got more than a tool — we have really initiated a major business transformation.”

Interested in learning more about the outcome chain approach? Have questions on how the process works? Get in touch with us! We love having conversations like these because they help your team focus on what’s important today while laying out the framework for new decisions, programs, or tools that’ll make a difference tomorrow.