Consulting firm Project management software for consulting firms
A consulting firm does not deliver a product: it delivers an analysis, a recommendation, sometimes a transformation. Project management software for a consulting firm therefore has to make visible what, by nature, is hard to prove. This is where the difference lies between an assignment the client remembers and an assignment the client ends up finding expensive.
What breaks in a consulting firm.
Four situations specific to the trade, and none of them has to do with the quality of the analysis.
The intangible deliverable
A report is handed over at once; the value, though, was produced during six months of workshops, trade-offs and defusing. Nothing keeps a trace of it, and at invoicing time only the document is left.
Multi-assignment staffing
One consultant on three assignments, one partner on twelve. Nobody really knows who is available next week, and the cost of switching between contexts is never counted.
Fixed price or time and materials, on the same assignment
The scoping is fixed price, the implementation time and materials, the support a number of days to consume. Three modes, three tracking logics, one spreadsheet.
Perceived value that erodes
The client forgets what was done in the first quarter. Without a dated record, the relationship is replayed at every management committee.
Why the tools on the market are not enough here.
Execution tools organize tasks, and a firm has few in the sense a software vendor means: it has workshops, interviews, presentations of findings. Breaking the work into tasks is artificial there, and is quickly abandoned.
Professional services tools, for their part, answer “is this assignment profitable” very well. That is necessary and insufficient, because the question that decides renewal lies elsewhere: does my client remember what we produced, and on what basis.
This asymmetry explains a situation many firms know: a profitable assignment, technically successful, and not renewed. Nothing failed; the sponsor simply changed, or the budget trade-off arrived, and nobody had at hand the record of what had been decided thanks to the assignment. The value produced existed, but it was not established.
This is also why the assignment committee deserves more attention than it usually gets in consulting, where it often passes for a formality between two presentations of findings.
What neither kind of tool carries is the dated record of what was promised, decided and delivered, read by the client as the work goes. This is what we call operational commitment management.
In pylotik.
Three points that answer the situations above.
The assignment leaves a record
Each committee produces minutes submitted to the client, approved, then locked. Twelve months later, what was decided and by whom is established, not recounted.
Staffing is readable
Committed workload against real capacity, week by week and person by person. See the workload plan.
The fixed-price part is steered
Gap between time spent and time sold, calculated at time entry. See fixed-price project tracking.
The full tour is on the product page, and the contract modes on the commitment levels. Profitability by assignment and by client is covered on profitability and margin.
What we are asked in consulting firms.
Does it suit time-and-materials assignments?
Yes, as long as the firm steers the assignment. The assignment's contract can be time and materials: the monthly schedule is calculated on the days produced and the rate of each profile. The need to match time spent against a dated commitment is smaller there than at fixed price; the benefit then lies in the record of decisions, approved committees and readable staffing.
How do I prove the value of an intangible deliverable?
By no longer trying to prove the deliverable, and by recording the decisions it made possible: trade-offs settled in committee, actions closed by their requester, milestones met. This is what the client remembers when renewing.
How do I manage a consultant on several assignments?
By writing down the split before suffering it, and by reserving a share of capacity for the cost of switching between contexts. A person at one third on three assignments produces less than three thirds of a person.
Do the partners need to be equipped?
Those who carry client commitments, yes, with a Pilot seat. The others take a Contributor seat. See the pricing.