Can You Afford Not Knowing Your Numbers in Real Time? Talking to clients and getting feedback straight away.

We hear say our customers say “I don’t know what we did before we had this data in real time!” So, what is the fuss all about?

Imagine a situation where Company A collects timesheets once per week and then a junior accountant does a quick P&L on each project, which takes another few days to complete. This empowers the organisation to know where they are with all of their projects, what their profitability is and progress against budget. You’d think this is ideal, but that can still lead to big issues in projects.

1. Managing a project without access to real-time business insights

Let’s now suppose, in the same organisation, there is a project which takes 15 day to complete, with a fixed price budget of £15,000. At the end of the first week of the project everything seems okay. At the end of the second week the project manager has an inkling that he may need more resources than expected, but he is not sure how much resource he consumed so doesn’t ring any alarms. On week 3, the project manager realises that the project won’t finish for another week, but he just got the numbers for week one, so whilst the project is late it is unclear what conversation to have with the customer, as he doesn’t yet know exactly how much resource he used up to date. Lack of concrete P&L combined with reluctance to have a difficult with the customer he lets it slide.

At the end of week 4, the project is complete. The project manager gets the sign off from the customer and thinks nothing of it. Nobody in the business really noticed until week 6, when the numbers come out, and it is now clear that the project ran for an extra week and cost extra 33% - eating away more than half of the expected gross profit on the job.

Most people who have dealt with budgets on projects in professional services firms would have at least seen this example once in their career. In practice, if an organisation is not measuring their project performance in near real time, this is likely to be a common place occurrence.

2. Managing a project with access to real-time business insights

Consider an alternative view - what would happen if the project manager had the insight to hand in real time? He would most likely have a chat with the account manager, and probably the customer. He would have explained that the budget needs to increase, and would have better managed the customer.  The organiastion might have increased its fees (likely as a result of the scope of work increasing during the project) and the customer relationship would be even stronger than before.

It is easy to see from this example how accessible real time information can change behaviour in an organisation.  We see this all the time, when organistion go from delayed reporting (and often no reporting) to real time insights in Supo. It changes the DNA of the business, enabling it to be more agile, and more accountable.

Check out a demo of Supo, and see how real time reporting could help you. Book now for a demo.