1. Which projects are profitable?
2. When can I bill and how much?
3. What risks exist in my projects and how do they impact profitability, billing, and on-time delivery?
4. What does capacity look like in the next 90-120 days based on current projects and expected bookings?
If you need the answers to these questions, keep reading.
Delivery leaders run their organizations based on the answers to these 4 simple questions. But too often, the answers seem impossible to find. Projects aren't standardized, timelines aren't accurate, and data isn't aggregated across systems, all of which negatively impacts your bottom line.
Most work management platforms can't adequately answer all four of those essential, seemingly impossible questions. In this blog post, we discuss the unique Moovila features that quickly answer those questions and keep your organization on the path to profitability.
1. Profitability
Which of my in-flight projects are profitable? Which ones are becoming unprofitable, and why?
Measuring profitability varies between different billing structures; fixed-fee, T&M, and any other payment model require different calculations to determine margins. However, in a services organization, a project's profitability is ultimately connected back to two things: the schedule itself, and the hours logged against it.
With this knowledge in mind, calculating accurate capacity forecasts therefore requires an understanding of the project's deadlines, budget, and structure at the atomic level. Aggregating all of this data into clear projections based on reliable calculations is not trivial, and most project management platforms don't enable you to adequately incorporate all this data into your profitability metrics.
Moovila automatically aggregates all project data and time entry data to forecast profitability for every project. You can quickly assess the Value and Impact of each project on the portfolio, and click on any of them to drill down and address problems.
2. Billing
When can I bill and how much? Which billing milestones are delayed, and how does that impact revenue and payroll?
Similar to profitability calculations, knowing how much you can bill at a given time relies fundamentally on the project plan; if you're not meeting billing milestones on time (especially in a fixed-fee project), or projecting risk of being late for a significant delivery date, that could cause cascading problems across the company, inhibiting your margins or even preventing you from making payroll.
Moovila's Critical Path Engine will highlight late tasks and milestones, showing clearly the cascading impacts of each problem across the project. This patent-pending tool enables you and your teams to quickly identify potential billing catastrophes well before they manifest, so you can address problems early and keep the business afloat.
3. On-Time Delivery and Hidden Risks
What risks exist in my projects and how do they impact profitability, billing, and on-time delivery? How do I resolve those risks to prevent delays and cost overruns?
How often does it seem that a project is completely fine, tracking on time, until suddenly it's catastrophically late and there's nothing you can do about it? Unfortunately, most PMs don't have the tools to know if their projects are truly on time, and therefore tend to paint a rosier picture than reality until it's too late.
The unfortunate truth: all your plans are fundamentally broken, but you don't have the tools to fix them.
The problem is not in the plan's content, but rather its structure. We're sure the content of your plans is great; with your industry experience, you've built detailed project plans over time that contain all the necessary tasks to deliver. However, there are mathematical, structural errors that are difficult to detect by even the most highly experienced PMs; risks like fragmentation, bottlenecks, and inter-project capacity conflicts can go undetected and derail your entire portfolio.
Moovila's RPAX provides automated risk detection powered by AI. Using a discrete math engine, we continuously search for hidden structural risks in every project and provide clear direction to solving them.
4. Capacity and Hiring
What does capacity look like in the next 90-120 days based on current projects and expected bookings? Do I need to find more work or hire more people?
As with the previous questions, assessing capacity and potential hiring needs requires an automated evaluation of every project and task in the portfolio. Some platforms calculate capacity based on percent-based project-level estimates; this method is grossly inadequate, as it doesn't account for the tasks that underly each project, as well as the durations and dependencies that determine when that person will actually be working on that project's tasks.
At Moovila, we calculate capacity forecasts with a PM-First mindset, aggregating atomic task-level data to ensure the most accurate picture of capacity possible. We achieve this by combining the Critical Path Engine with SmartSchedule, our innovative calendar integration that prioritizes your tasks and schedules them around the events in your calendar. If your platform isn't projecting capacity from the task level up, you're not getting the full picture.
Even more, Moovila's Resource Capacity Analysis tools bring all of your capacity data into one place to view, forecast, and manage in real time. This empowers you to know with certainty how many resources you need to execute on time, even as projects evolve.
Conclusion
As a delivery leader, using a work management platform that can answer these four key questions is essential to keeping your business profitable and completing implementations on-time.
With Moovila, these answers will always be right at your fingertips; click here to learn more or schedule a demo today.
