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Project Revenue Win-Loss Graph

When bidding for projects, you win some and you lose some.  It’s like any sales process.  Each project has it’s own percentage of win/loss.

Of course, that can be frustrating.  You perform a bunch of research, develop a preliminary project plan, and then develop a project propsal, only to learn that somebody else go tthe job.  Or worse, the propective client goes dark and you never hear from them again.  They don’t come back and thank you for all your hard work in developing the plan and proposal.  Instead, they just ignore you.  They’ve obviously moved on, but don’t have the couirtesy to tell you.

That’s life.  🙁

But at least you have a nice project funnel to predict possible future revenue.  And it works from that percentage of win/loss you enter into each project.  Consider the following scenario:

Project A: Win percentage: 90%, $45,000
Project B: Win percentage: 75%, $80,000
A sales funnel says you about 82% chance of winning a deal, and the expected revenue is about $100K.

Of course two projects is not really enough.  You should put a lot more projects into the funnel for the estimation to be accurate.  The more projects in the hopper, the more likely the averages are to be real.

Check out this video too:
https://www.stdtime.com/videos/revenueforecast.htm

 

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Employee Availability Chart

Do you have an engineer available for a project?  How do you know?  What tasks are they working on?  Are they over-worked?  Or under?

There are answers to all these questions.  Scroll down and watch this video for some ideas.

Get a bar chart of upcoming work an engineer is assigned to.  How is the chart built?  It comes from projects the employee is assigned to, and specific tasks.

Here are a few other videos to learn more:

http://www.stdtime.com/videos/resourceallocation.htm

http://www.stdtime.com/videos/employeeavailability.htm

 

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Clients and Project Relationships

If you’re like most companies, you perform multiple projects for each client.  You may perform them serially, or several at once.  Each one may have different billing rates.  They may have different tasks.  Different starting and due dates.  Watch the video below to see the relationship between projects and clients.  This is a good way to manage projects.

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Project Portfolio Management

Watch this video below for tips on managing portfolios of projects.  A project portfolio contains one or more projects with similar characteristics.  For instance, you might put all your consulting projects into one portfolio.  Or, you might put marketing or sales together.  Or, there may be completely different lines along which your projects naturally fall.  Those belong in portfolios.

Once you have placed projects into a portfolio, you can do special things with them.  Try running reports for all projects in a portfolio, or comparing one portfolio against another.  You can see project revenue for a single selected portfolio.  Or you could filter the resource allocation chart for a selected portfolio.

Consider how you might group your projects for effective portfolio reporting.

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Project Costing and Billing Rates

Unique costs and billing rates can be set for every project.  Even if you have 500 different projects each can have a different rate.

There are actually five different project costing models in Standard Time®.

  1. User rates
  2. Category rates
  3. Project rates
  4. Role rates
  5. Option Year rates

You can choose any of those these for a given project.  That means each project task and each time log associated with a project can potentially compute client and salary rates differently.  Usually, the same choices are made for all projects, and just the user rates are changed for each one.  But, you could change the model for each project.

 

 

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Employee Skill Availability

Ever wonder if an employee is scheduled for tasks next month?  Or next week?

How would you know?  Ask them?

There’s another way.  Schedule some tasks, assign employees, and then open this resource availability window.  You’ll see a graph of all the hours an employee has available to them.  If there are gaps, schedule more tasks.  Maybe you should ask them first, but then do it, and you’ll have some nice documentation that shows who is scheduled and who is not.

And, there’s a flip-side to this.

Resource allocation is the flip-side to employee availability.  In other words, an employee is available when they are not allocated to tasks.

You might have a need to find resources by their skillsets.  Looking for an ‘Engineer 1’ or ‘Engineer 2’ qualification?  Use this tool to find them.  You can then assign them to your project… after asking them first.  (People aren’t machines.  And you probably shouldn’t call them ‘resources’ either.  They are human beings and like to be consulted before blindly signed up for anything.)

Watch the video to see if this might be useful to you and your project.

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Future Project Billing Rates

With Standard Time® an administrator can predict how much a project will cost. The dates for the project are sometimes far enough into the future that you must set future rates.  You can create date ranges that contain future billing rates.

For example, suppose you needed to predict project costs into 2017 and 2018.  (still future at the time of the article)

The salary and billing rates are likely different for those future years.  You may not know exactly what they will be, but you have an idea.  The software lets you enter your predictions, and uses them for tasks that are scheduled to begin then.

So, back to our 2017 and 2018 example… your future rates will be used for tasks that are scheduled on those future dates.  Each task has a starting date.  Each task is assigned to users.  So, the user rates for those dates are incorporated into the cost of each task.

A task in 2018 may cost more than a task in 2017.  The software knows this.

Watch the video for details.

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Simple Timesheet Notes

Standard Time® allows you to put notes in with your time. Keep track of projects and remind yourself along the way!

These timesheet notes can serve many purposes.  They can find their way onto client invoices.  They can act as project status in a report.  Or, they can simply remind you of what you did.  Consider this the biggest project communication tool you have.  It is your memory… it is your direct communication to clients and consumers of your project work… and it is historical documentation your organization can rely on.

All that from a simple edit field in a project timesheet?

Not really… there are other time log fields that serve the same purpose.  Don’t overlook the start and stop times.  Those simple fields mean a lot to consumers of your work.  The date alone is big.  The timestamp is better, but not always necessary or used.  And consider that the project, subproject, client, and category all help to categorize the work you do.  All that is collected without a lot of effort, but those who view your historical records find it invaluable.

 

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Project Revenue Win/Loss Chart

Standard Time® lets you see revenue estimates for your projects. Project revenue estimates are like Win/Loss charts.  Another analogy is the traditional sales funnel.  You win some projects, you lose others.  And when predicting, you set a percentage of likely win.  This chart shows the possible outcome over the next 12 months.

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Project Management

Manage the projects and tasks that show up in the timesheet.  Employees only see tasks that are assigned to them.  That makes collecting time for tasks easier.  Employees aren’t so barraged with projects and tasks that they can’t find the ones they are working on.