resource planning

When it comes to your service offering strategy, we’re here to advocate that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to deliver exceptional results to your clients.

We know what you’re thinking – “each deal is unique” and “every project custom”. However, creating a new offering for each deal poses limitations for operational efficiency and growth. Truth is, every client is unique, but how the solutions to their problems are discovered, strategized and delivered can be repeatable.

What are Productized Services?

Productized service offerings are predefined services that are packaged and sold like products. They come with set pricing, features, and delivery parameters that can be sold in a repeatable manner. This strategy has become increasingly popular for organizations who seek to increase operational efficiency and growth. It allows for the standardization of services, freeing up time spent on defining and strategizing delivery of new solutions, and bridging the gap between sales and delivery expectations. 

More than likely, you already have a head start to packaging your services. Whether or not you have it formalized, if you use a discovery phase with your new clients, you have a productized service. It’s a set amount of time, effort, and price. From here, sales can pick up from the discovery and pitch a solution. According to SPI research, of best in class organizations, 80% of revenue was generated through productized service offerings.

Benefits of Adopting the Model

1. Standardization: Productized service offerings can act as the bridge between sales and delivery when operations are standardized. Sales can better inform clients on the delivery process and outcomes, and delivery knows exactly what the expectations are when a service is sold.
2. Scalability: When you standardize and productize your service offerings, you free up more time to focus on the things that will help your business thrive. You’ll spend less time developing unique delivery strategies for each client project, enabling you to concentrate on growth and expand your service offerings.
3. Predictable revenue streams: As projects flow in the pipeline, you are able to predict project revenue more accurately by using the baseline established for the service. Assigning a set amount of time, resources, and revenue to each service allows for a more precise estimation of your revenue stream per project.
4. Market Differentiation: One of the key advantages of productized service offerings is that they create market differentiation for your organization. While many agencies may offer similar services, having a clearly defined approach and end result will set you apart from your competition.

How to Adopt & Implement Productized Service Offerings   

When it comes to adopting productized service offerings, we turn to Mckinsey’s Three Horizons of Growth. The strategic framework is used to help business plan for growth while balancing attention between current and future opportunities. Let’s define each horizon and their functions. 

Horizon 1: Maintaining and strengthening core business – Operational efficiency

This horizon focuses on perfecting the services that are the profit center of your business. The goal is to create operational efficiency within these services to ensure stable deliverability and profitability in the organization. Productizing these core services can help to reach that goal so you can also focus attention on growth opportunities. 

Horizon 2: Explore & discover expansions – Operational Growth 

Now that you’ve created operational efficiency around your core services, what are you doing to expand on them? The focus in this horizon is on discovering and exploring new opportunities. These expansion opportunities usually come with a bit more risk; however, they bring the potential for additional revenue and new offerings to your clients. 

Horizon 3: Creation of new possibilities – Strategic Growth

Here is where you can really start to drill into the strategic evolution of what you can offer your clients. Horizon three is all about the “blue-sky” innovation – creating new capabilities and models that transform the company or even the industry. 

Implementing productized services using Mckinsey’s Three Horizons of Growth framework allow for the continuous cycle of creating growth opportunities and turning them into core profit centers of the business.

Creating a routine in your service offerings turn what used to be a reactive approach to client projects, into clockwork for all teams involved. In doing so leaves you room to focus on the strategic development of your agency.

Disrupt Reactive Operational Habits

At Parallax, we’re all about giving you the tools you need to create operational efficiency and plan for the future. When paired with a productized service strategy, Parallax offers agencies the tools needed to strategically allocate resources across projects, determine project health, and forecast capacity based on in-pipeline opportunities.

Have questions about how you can use Parallax to support your service offering strategy? Book a demo.

3 Steps for Getting Started    

The Clockwork team focused on three primary factors when adopting Parallax and implementing project margin and forecasting best practices:

1. Technology: Clockwork first made sure their business-critical data integrated with Parallax, such as their time tracking software Harvest and CRM platform Hubspot, to create a central hub of trusted data that everyone worked from. The team coordinated with Parallax to understand the platform’s best practices and proven strategies and utilized them as a blueprint for their operations. 

2. Process: Then, Clockwork started to dig into the projects that were consistently maintained at a good margin and identified where they kept having moments of complexity. With these insights, they better understood which types of projects to prioritize and which to avoid, and they developed standard operating procedures (SOPs) for their service offerings to guide teams on how to approach each type of project and what to watch for. Creating SOPs also allows Clockwork’s teams to use their brain power for the more innovative, custom work that requires their energy and creativity. 

“We wanted to be a little bit more standardized in the way that we were solving problems, so we documented our processes so that they’re relatively repeatable and efficient,” said Jenny Holman, president, Clockwork. “Then, the bespoke part of what we do can be where we spend more of our time — plus, that’s the fun stuff we like to dig into as a company.” 

3. People: They also had to communicate to the broader Clockwork team the value of forecasting and the importance of more closely tracking project margins via Parallax. “While project margin is one success metric, the bigger picture is about delivering the best client experience,” said Holman. “We made sure to cover the “what’s in it for me?” in a way that people could connect to – if we have a strong forecast, we know how we’re going to do the work, how everything will line up, and what enhancements or changes we can or need to make.”

The Value of Directionally Accurate Forecasting 

Forecasting is essentially well-informed estimating. Your numbers won’t be exact, as it’s not a precise exercise. But when done consistently with the right data, you should gain a directionally accurate picture of the business so you can make proactive decisions.

“The data from Parallax allows us to learn each and every time what’s working and what’s not,” said Holman. “Let’s take a step back and think: do we need to estimate this differently? Did we miss a critical opportunity to have a conversation with the client? Are we not right-sizing the solution to the available budget? You have to give people the space to understand that it’s not them failing, but rather a chance for all of us to understand how we can do things better or differently.” 

Clockwork utilizes its forecasting insights from Parallax in a few ways to shape a better, more profitable future for the business: 

1. Client relationship insights: Clockwork looks across their client portfolio – not just individual projects – to understand which relationships are profitable and which aren’t, and then they answer the ‘why.’ They’re intentional with their collected learnings and apply them as quickly as they can. “We lean into that curiosity and ask, ‘what is happening here? What are we working with exactly, and how do we apply that information to our future estimations?,” said Holman. 

2. Service offering insights: Clockwork tracks the services they offer to understand where they’re profitable and regularly course correcting, using Parallax data as an early indicator when something might be going off the rails on a project.  

“I regularly use the margin report and project health report within Parallax — you can sort by lowest margin to highest, so it’s really easy for me to flag where I should take a closer look and ask some questions to make sure the team has their eye on the prize,” said Courtney Miner, director of client success, Clockwork. “Is it something we can address internally? Do we need to have a conversation with the client? These reports provide a trigger for real-time discussions.”

3. Capacity and utilization insights: Accurate forecasting also helps improve capacity and utilization. “If you think about the hours that we have in the day for our people to do the brilliant work that they do, and if we don’t fill that capacity today, it’s gone tomorrow,” said Holman. “Thinking about utilization and forecasting and keeping our people at a sustainable capacity but also helps hit those margins is something that we’re always looking at. The utilization increase that we’ve had because of our visibility and ability to be proactive has driven our margin higher.” 

Real-time is the Best Time  

“Parallax enables conversations to happen at the right time – as soon as possible – because that’s the best time for them to happen,” said Miner.

Have questions about tracking and managing project margin? Interested in adopting best practices that improve your revenue? Ready to have more accurate forecasting? The Parallax team looks forward to connecting with you.  

Figuring out the best time tracking software for your digital service organization is surprisingly quite straight-forward – it’s the one your team is currently using for time entry, the one your finance team is comfortable invoicing from, and the one you’ve invested years integrating into your workflows. 

Yup, that’s right — despite the myriad of options out there promising revolutionary changes, we advocate for the value and familiarity of the systems your organization has already put its trust in.

The Unpopular Reality of Time Entry

Let’s be honest… no one enjoys doing their timesheets. It’s a mundane task that’s often seen as a necessary evil and, frankly, it’s a bit of a drag. But here’s the thing: timesheets, while tactical, are crucial for operational success. They are the pulse by which many businesses bill, pay, and measure productivity. 

That said, the disdain for time entry doesn’t mean your organization should leap for a new time tracking software at the first sign of discontent or inefficiency. Switching to a new system might seem like an opportunity to improve operations in your digital services business, but it’s important that you ask yourself what outcome you hope to see following the change: is giving your billable people a better user interface for entering time going to drive strategic change in the business? 

An “easier” interface or a “single source of truth” often tempts leadership into believing it will unlock new levels of efficiency or employee satisfaction, but this overlooks a fundamental truth: 

the real strategic value lies not in the tool used for time tracking but in how effectively a company plans resources, forecasts demand, and manages project finances.

The Cost of Unnecessary Change

Embracing a new time tracking software doesn’t just involve learning a new interface or tweaking a few processes. It’s a substantial change that impacts invoicing, payroll, task management, and, most crucially, the daily routines of every individual contributor in your organization. This kind of change is not only disruptive but also expensive – both in terms of direct costs and the indirect toll it takes on productivity and morale. 

On top of all that, it’s very likely people aren’t going to like the new time tracking software. At best, they might dislike it a little less than the old one – so why bother?

Leveraging Existing Infrastructure for Strategic Advantage

By enhancing your existing processes with cutting-edge resource management, capacity planning, and project accounting features, your business can adopt best practices for strategic planning without the unnecessary friction and upheaval of replacing foundational systems.

That’s where Parallax comes in. Our founders spent dozens of years growing digital services companies and specifically built the tool to focus on strategic operations over tactical things like time tracking. 

Parallax has demonstrated through rigorous analysis and real-world outcomes that mastering strategic resource planning, accurate forecasting, and proactive project accounting are the true catalysts for enhancing billable utilization, boosting project margins, and driving revenue growth. These are the areas where strategic value is created and sustained, far beyond the superficial ease of new time tracking software. 

Parallax shines by integrating seamlessly into the CRM and time tracking software systems you already use, focusing on elevating your strategic capabilities rather than overhauling or disrupting your tactical tools. This approach helps digital service organizations achieve significant gains in billable utilization, project margins, and revenue growth and advocates for smarter use of current investments to elevate strategic effectiveness.

Keep Your Focus on Strategic Value 

The quest for the best time tracking software might be a red herring in the pursuit of operational excellence. Instead, the key to unlocking significant improvements in billable utilization, project margin, and revenue growth lies in refining your approach to strategic resource planning, forecasting, and project accounting. 

Parallax is designed to empower your team to achieve these goals using the tools you’ve already mastered, reaffirming that, sometimes, the best change is no change at all.

If you have questions about the software and systems you currently use and whether they can integrate with Parallax, we’re ready to chat when you are.