If you are managing your MSP’s projects with tickets in Halo, this integration will help you increase efficiencies and revenue when it comes to projects
What’s your system for managing projects? Do you pull out a spreadsheet? Use a ticket to jot some notes? Slap some reminders in your calendar? Scribble parameters and specs on a yellow legal pad?
You should rethink that.
When you don’t have a robust solution for managing this important part of your MSP business, you will find yourself over budget, out of time, and asking your client for more of both more frequently than you’d like. Project management is an industry and a science because getting complex projects done right is hard. You may not need a dedicated project manager, but you do need good tools.
Fortunately, if you use HaloPSA, a richly featured, state-of-the art intelligent project management integration – Perfect Project for MSPs – is a few clicks away.
A better way to manage projects
Integrating Perfect Project will help you address some of the biggest challenges of running projects. It is a full featured project management tool – with an artificial intelligence at its heart – that runs a single project or a portfolio of them while streamlining the way you manage project tickets, resources, and reporting. Once you have its artificial intelligence on the job, it monitors your projects 24/7, checking every task and deadline for hiccups.
Getting projects out of tickets and into this automatically monitored tool takes work off your plate while improving the profitability, predictability, and efficiency of your projects. It will forecast potential budget overages or late delivery because you will be visually alerted – well in advance of a problem – anytime a missed task threatens to derail the plan. “Our critical path engine forecasts the timelines, schedules and financing on your projects to help you with high-level project management, portfolio management, and dashboard reporting,” says Louis Bagdonas, senior program manager of MSPs at Moovila. “We have integrations with CRM, financial tools, calendar tools and – most importantly for Halo users – HaloPSA.”
Easy due diligence for projects
Managing projects well is, for a human, an enormous amount of work. First, you have to calculate every step of the process to estimate an accurate price and delivery date. Then, once people are assigned to do the work, the real labor starts. Someone has to monitor each task, notice when one isn’t completed, and recalculate every step to see if that delayed task threatens to derail the delivery date or budget.
Many MSPs apply much less diligence to managing projects, though. “People are tracking entire projects from a service ticket,” says Morgan Aspinall, Product Manager at HaloMSP. This is risky.
A lack of clear scope can lead to scope creep and change requests having to be raised mid project.
“You lose so much capability, in terms of understanding your timeline, your resource allocation, phases, profitability, and budgeting,” he says. “A lack of clear scope can lead to scope creep and change requests having to be raised mid project. This holds everything up, which then affects other projects and resources. Make sure you have a structure that is at least two levels deep,” he says, “utilizing all the features that you can from Halo and Moovila.”
Perfect Project does the calculating, forecasting, and monitoring so you scope the project correctly from the start. The more you use it, the more automated this process becomes. The first time you do a project, you enter every item on your To-Do list – or import them from HaloPSA – to forecast the completion date. Eventually once you get familiar with the common To-Do list items, or if you already are, you can create a template for that type of project. Every time you do a similar job, you can simply open the template to build out your project, then change a few parameters specific to this client’s work, then easily get a forecasted timeline complete with estimated completion date.
This makes creating project plans easy. But it is the autonomous monitoring of projects that will save you the most time and money.
Track it
Perfect Project monitors each to-do list, project task, and milestone in every one of your projects 24 hours a day. It notices immediately if a task isn’t completed on time and instantly recalculates the forecast, changing the RPAX score to alert the project manager that something is amiss.
In Perfect Project, a glance at this RPAX score will tell you if a project – or a portfolio of them – is healthy or if something needs attention. This is where your project manager will work, assigning people to tasks and keeping an eye on the health of the project.
Figure 1: The RPAX score for a portfolio of projects in Perfect Project
The people on your team who don’t often dip into Perfect Project will also benefit from the work being done by Perfect Project’s Critical Path Engine and the project manager in Perfect Project. All the status changes and rescheduling that is done in Perfect Project is immediately reflected in the project status column in HaloPSA.
Figure 2: The project status changes that are made in Perfect Project are immediately reflected in HaloPSA's status field.
The connection is two-way and synced in real time.
Analyze it
Once you have run a few iterations of a specific project – tweaking your template to perfection – you will have a strong sense of what your projects cost in terms of time and resources. This can help some MSPs mature as they move from billing these projects as time and materials to offering them at a fixed price.
Even if you intend to wrap these projects into a service contract, having this level of insight into projects helps you see where you are making money and where you need to raise prices or improve efficiency.
Having the granular data that you get from a robust project plan can help you create this efficiency.
For example, when you run a Site relocation project, you assign charge rates and resource types to each task you do to get this new client up and running. These charge rates and resource types are saved within your template.
Let’s say you assign a level three engineer to a task because it involves traveling to the site. You assume it’s easier to have one person do that, even if that person is overqualified for some of the work. On site – and out of your field of vision – that engineer spends eight hours doing work that could have been handled by someone much less expensive.
You don’t have to be there to see this. Take a moment at the end of the project and you can see this was an expensive decision. You can easily calculate, based on this one project, what this decision is costing your firm over time. Just as easily, you can change the template so that a level one engineer goes along to help with this work in the future.
Improve it
Once you have spent some time running projects from templates, you will have access to a wealth of data that can improve efficiency across all the work you do and inform your high-level decisions.
With Moovila’s Template Analytics feature you can quickly get a dose of reality – pulled from your own work data.
Let’s say, for example, that – over the course of the past year – you have been building projects with a series of assumptions about how long tasks take. One of these assumptions, in your customer onboarding template, is that your solutions architect needs two hours to assess a new client’s network.
From the Template Analytics menu, you can dig into what really happened. A quick look shows that assessing a network actually takes, on average, 4.3 hours.
You can drill deeper into this data to see how this task played out in specific projects.
This is good data to have when scoping a project. You don’t have to do anything special to gather it. Simply run your project with this robust tool, keeping the work on track and your prices and delivery dates accurate as you do it. Perfect Project collects data as you work.
Building out this sort of precision around pricing projects, delivering them, and looking back at what happened to see which ones are profitable, can help you see ways to take your MSP toward higher profits. You might learn that you need to raise your price on some projects or that there is a type of project that is, for your team, wildly profitable. This will help you direct your sales team, your hiring efforts, and more.
The first step toward this end game is to connect HaloPSA to the Perfect Project integration and build out a project with it. As you use it, running more and more projects with it, your systems will improve and become more automated. “You can’t make improvements in a vacuum,” says Halo’s Aspinall. “You have to start somewhere.”
Take Moovila Perfect Project for a spin on our click-through tour, or see a demo of the new HaloPSA integration in our on-demand webinar featuring Morgan Aspinall, Product Manager, HaloPSA and Louis Bagdonas, Senior Program Manager – MSPs, Moovila.
