Asta Teamplan is a software solution that enables organisations to centrally manage people, processes and finances across multiple projects and ad-hoc work. It provides organisations with the tools to optimise staff utilisation rates, track time and expenses, control project costs, and generate accurate reports on key performance indicators.
Asta helps consultancies maximise their fee-earning potential by addressing common project and resource management related issues such as those addressed throughout this document.
Lack of integrated IT systems (only 20% of project management, timesheet & billing
systems are integrated), procedures and corporate culture have lead to many of these key issues occurring. The severity and relative importance of these issues is highly dependent upon the size of the organisation. Larger organisations (more than 40 payroll-based consultants) are more likely than smaller organisations to recognise the need to deal with these issues. Despite this, across all organisations surveyed, the systems used to deal with these issues are largely inadequate, not integrated and generally not based on the needs of the business as a whole.
The predominance of standalone software tools creates ‘data islands’ within the
organisation. Operational managers responsible for providing board-level reporting on client activity tend to spend a great deal of time attempting to reconcile these ‘data islands’. This leads to issues with data accuracy and, in many cases, a lack of trust at board-level in the quality of data for decision-making.
How client project work is organised can result in the key issues becoming more
pronounced. Most consultancies handle either project-based client work or a mixture of project and ad-hoc based work. The task of managing these different types of work – as well as everyday non fee-earning work – is an ongoing challenge for operational management. Fundamentally it is easier to manage one consultant who works full-time on one project but this is often not the situation. Often consultants work on multiple projects at the same time and generally client projects require different consultants at different times, reporting on a wide variety of activities and billing different amounts.
The survey indicates that in many cases the IT systems in place are simply not up
to the job – particularly in terms of providing senior executives with the information they need to manage the business profitably.