Transcript for "Driving Growth and Profitability with Ajera":
Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's presentation, driving growth and profitability with Azure. Just a few housekeeping notes to get us started. We recommend using Google Chrome for the best webinar experience. Audio is streamed through your device, so no need to dial in, but make sure your volume's up. You'll be able to download the slides in the resources tab at the top right, and you'll also have access to the recording of today's presentation within twenty four hours. To set the stage, a bit for today's presentation, we're gonna be talking about managing growth and where Azira can help for a lot of smaller or midsize firms that we work with. Growth is certainly a goal. Of course, growth without proper projects and financial control is how a lot of firms end up busier but less profitable at the same time. More projects, more people, more moving pieces, and it gets harder to see what's actually happening until things are already off track. And that's what we're gonna dig into today within Azure. We'll walk through how Azure gives you the project insight and process automation to make smarter decisions. We want you to free up time that your team is maybe losing on manual processes, and we're gonna show you what this looks like live within the product. So let's start with the first piece, how Azure helps make smarter projects and financial decisions. And a good place to start is with a core problem that nearly every growing firm runs into. You're trying to scale up, but you don't wanna lose visibility into what's actually happening on your projects. For a lot of smaller firms, partners, owners, principals are used to being heavily involved on every project. But if you've grown from a firm with 10 projects to 50 or 20 projects to a 100, it's just not realistic to be as in the weeds on every project as it was when you were a fifth of the size. Azure can help with these growing pains in several ways. First, project visibility. You see project health in real time, so you're not making decisions off numbers that are two weeks old. Reports can be concise and help you understand what needs your attention. And then also resource management. You can see workloads across every project and every team member. So staffing and scheduling decisions are based on what's actually happening, not just guesswork. And then financial performance, clear visibility into key performance indicators, firm health, and profitability, all stay visible so you can keep them on track as the firm grows instead of those things getting harder to see the bigger you get. And we'll talk about how automation. And the second lever that Azure can really help you pull on is automation. We like to say that insight only helps if your team actually has time to act on it. And this is maybe more of a point for firms that are newer to Azure. Existing Azure users tend to see these benefits right away, but Azure can cut down on a lot of manual work in a few specific areas. Time and expense entries sync automatically into reporting and into client invoicing instead of getting entered two or three places, spreadsheets or separate accounting systems or separate billing tools manually. Built in approvals can help catch mistakes before they turn into rework later on, stuff that maybe slips through the cracks. Invoicing can move faster because there are fewer manual steps between doing the work and billing for it. In fact, there are reports that will help monitor work in progress so you can see how long WIP sits in work in progress before you bill it as well as how long it takes your clients to pay you. And then the net effect of all that is that your team gets more time back to actually do client work instead of project administrative work. So with that, let's get into Azure. These are the points that we're gonna focus in on today. We're gonna look at how you can identify potential trouble on projects at a glance, then we'll dig into the schedule manager and show you what scheduling resources, managing project plans looks like. And along the way, we'll talk about how Azure can help automate and streamline common project administrative tasks. So let's go ahead and jump into Azure. So we're gonna start on one of my favorite dashboard views, call it project performance. Project performance is a dashboard that we've set up that really is intended to give a good understanding of what's happening across the firm's entire project portfolio. So top of the page highlights key performance indicators, and these are more project focused KPIs. So looking across all current active projects, understanding average profitability that we've achieved on those projects, what's the average net fee multiplier, effective multiplier that we've achieved on those jobs, looking at earned value concepts as well, cost performance index, schedule performance index. Those are metrics that are just baked right into Azure that you can see on dashboard and are numbers that update in real time. Every time I log into Azure, I'm looking at current up to date financial information across all my projects. If we scroll down a little ways, we get into the active project list. And that active project list is simply a list view of all the current open active projects that we have within Azure, a quick summary of of what's happening with each one of those projects. So we establish your projects. You can enter a contract amount or a budget amount for that job. Azure is keeping track of what you're spending. Spent is a reflection of effort that's gone into your project at billing rates. Your team enters time, you and our expenses, all that's accruing in that spent value. So it's a really good way to understand project date, what have we actually burned versus what we had contracted or budgeted. We're keeping track of what's actually been billed. So if you issue invoices out of Basura, it's the total billed amount. We're keeping track of work in progress. So work in progress is this reflection of effort that's gone into your project that hasn't yet been billed. Your team enters time. You enter expenses. That effort sits in work in progress until you do something with it. You bill it. You write it off. You move it to a different project. You can have a good understanding of how much potential billable value is accruing project over project. The system allows you to recognize revenue. We're tracking accrued cost and overhead, which can tell us total cost on a project. Revenue minus cost tells us how profitable we are. Fairly simple. Straight to the point. Here's where we stand. Project date across all of our current open active projects. If you're not currently using Azure or if you're newer to Azure, it's worth noting that when we look at dashboard content, this is an example of a dashboard that will typically provide clients as a starting place or a version that's very similar to this. Anything that you see in a dashboard can be modified. It can be reconfigured. So when you look at these key performance indicators, when you look at the different charts, when you look at the tables, all of that is information that can be modified. If you wanna add columns to a report, if you wanna remove columns, if you wanna change color coding conditions that you see, if you wanna add a graphic to a chart, if you wanna build your own reports from scratch, all of that can be done through the dashboard widget designer within Azure. A lot of these canned or standard or gallery reports that we provide try to promote best practice ideas based on feedback that we get from clients. This is what we're typically being asked for. But if you wanna make some modifications, if this doesn't quite hit the mark, you you really have a lot of room to get in here and modify the the content of the dashboard, really tweak it, and and make it your own. Once you're looking at a dashboard, there's a bit of action that you could take from these reports. Anywhere you see an item showing up in blue, the blue indicates there's a link to drill into further detail. The same thing can be true with the charts or with the key performance indicator, the KPI widgets. There's an ability to create a link. So if you want to click to drill further into a number, there's always the option or can be the option to drill down. The other way to interact with dashboard content is through the use of widget filters. So any one of those column headings can be used to apply a filter as well as sorting or grouping options. So if I'm doing a bit of analysis on my projects, I've got a list of all my current open active work. I'm trying to get a better sense of where we should be focusing marketing efforts moving forward. So I want a better understanding of maybe what's the type of work that we've gone after that we've been most successful with. I might base that on type of projects, the different markets that we work in, click on that column heading, and say, let's group all of our project results. We'll do a collapse group based on that project type. It takes all that project content, groups detail based on that project type, and I can quickly get a sense of, profitability wise, where have we tend... Tended to be more profitable. Or if I'm trying to get a sense of contract load, what types of markets do we tend to have the the heaviest concentration of of projects in? Or even if I'm doing reporting for my liability insurance and I need to understand build revenue by market, it's a quick way to get to that type of number without having to build a new report or pulling a bunch of data to Excel. Maybe you're sitting down with your project manager, and you might say, I wanna look at this list, but let me narrow my focus on projects where Brian's the project manager. We're doing Brian's project review as a PM. I'm gonna filter that list of projects to say, just show me the projects where Brian is my project manager. Everything in that report filters for just his jobs. And now I can start to do these things like WIP review. Let... Let's review the work in progress on the jobs that you're currently managing. Let's figure out if there are projects that we need to focus in on and figure out, you know, are we on track from a... An earnings perspective versus what we've burned or spent project to date? And this again gives me good information at the project level, but from here, I can also continue to take further action. We might say, I really wanna drill into a project to better understand how did we actually spend the money that we've spent to this point on this project. If you pick on a project, project name, project number, that'll then drill you down into more of a detailed project view. So for this example, we're looking at project detail specifically for the 2608 Lloyd Center West conversion project. When I drill into that project, I'm presented again with a snapshot view in dollars and hours, but I'm also starting to see information at the phase level. So when you set up a project in the share app, you can define a work breakdown structure for that job. If projects are broken down to different phases of work, different tasks, different milestones, can have an understanding of what that project's phase structure looks like. How did we distribute the contract per phase? What's the labor portion of the budget versus dollars that we have committed to our sub consultants or or maybe expenses? If I click on a phase, say, I click on schematic design, it's gonna populate down below. Here's all the labor that's gone into the number that we're looking at up above. We've spent 25,800 in labor costs. This is exactly where that number is coming from. These are the employees that put time to that project. These are the hours that they worked. If I drill into the employee, this allows me to drill down to really the lowest transaction level detail. Here's each and every time entry that Brian's dropped to this project. What days did he put in time? What types of work did he do? How many hours did he work each day? What were the notes that he captured on his time sheet? Has that time been approved? All that's information that I can drill into to have a better understanding of how did I get to this point on this project. So if we take a step back, that initial project performance dashboard can give me a good understanding of how our portfolio of work is trending, where there might be projects that I need to pay a little closer attention to. And when I wanna answer more specific questions as to how did I get to that point, those drill downs take me right into relevant detailed information for that project. Now depending on what your role is within the organization, you might have a little different presentation of this data. If you log in to the system as a project manager, this filter for PM might already be applied to all of your project views, to all of your dashboard views, I should say. I log in to the system as a PM. I'm only gonna see the projects that I'm the project manager of. I log in to the system as an administrator. I likely have access to every project within the company. Another focus of Azure is where is this project heading. Have we developed a project plan that's gonna keep us on track and on budget? And a really useful tool to help us manage that is Azure's schedule manager. So the schedule manager has two views. There's a project view, and there's an employee view, which I'll show you in just a moment. The project view gives you this breakdown of all of your current open active projects. If you expand on the project, it's gonna show you that project's work breakdown structure. So the phases, in this case, schematic design, design development, so forth, under each phase, the resources that you've budgeted for. So in this example, Brian, Roger, Paul, Pat, we have a couple unnamed generic resources all working on the schematic design phase within the Lloyd Center West conversion project. The schedule manager gives me a view into the project's budget. In this case, I'm looking at hours. We could show this in dollars. We could show a combination of dollars and hours depending on what you wanna see. But in this case, what's the hour budget for the resource rolled up to the phase to the project? How many hours have we actually worked. So as these folks enter time in their Azure time sheet, we can keep track of hours worked versus hours budgeted, budget lesson. Actual tells us what's remaining. Scheduled would be hours that we've planned out into the future. So remaining budget versus future scheduled tells us if we have anything remaining or available within our project budget to schedule further. Let's actually look at a project that's a little earlier on in its life. So we have a project that we've just got started on. We've entered a little bit of time, but we can see we have quite a bit of time planned on out to the future. This project budget information is all detailed that pulls from the project command center. We don't have time to cover that tool today, but when you create a project, you can establish your work breakdown structure. You can plan your resources. You can develop your budget. You can also enter a schedule detail, identify start and completion dates to define what's the expected time frame for the different phases within that project. Schedule manager is there to allow you to define how do you plan to spend that money. So we've established who the potential project team is gonna be on on the project. The columns here to the right are showing us upcoming weeks, So we can start to plan out how many hours do we expect Chris to be working on this project to complete his work. If we expect him to spend an additional twenty hours over the following two weeks, that we can get a sense of where that's gonna put us at completion. Are we building a plan that's gonna put us on budget? Are we building a plan that's gonna put us over budget? When it comes to scheduling, you can simply make modifications, edits within the cells. So if I wanna update hours based on updates that might happen to the expected workload for this project, I can make edits here, roll back into that grid. If you've identified start and completion dates, you can click on remaining hours, and you can tell the system go ahead and spread that schedule out over that time frame. Azure will recognize the dates that you've already entered in the project command center, and it'll prefill those dates. You can adjust those dates if the project schedule is adjusted, make changes to the the dates that get used to spread that time, but that would allow you to spread those hours out over that time frame. So So you could say, take the remaining budget, spread those hours out over that time frame, and it'll spread that work for you. For a lot of firms, that's a great and a first pass tool to say, I... I've established a budget. Just spread the time out over the expected time frame. That's gonna give me an idea of about how utilized that employee is gonna be. Each employee is gonna be on that project for that phase duration. And And then if I need to make modifications, I need to make adjustments based on the idea that maybe a project is front front or back loaded, I can make adjustments and see where I land after I make my adjustments. The data that we enter in the project schedule translates to the employee view. The employee view gives sort of the inverse look of that. It's gonna list out all of the employees, and under the employee, list out all the projects that you have that employee scheduled to be working on, projects and phases. So week over week, how many hours do I have each individual planned? That rolls up to tell me how utilized that employee is gonna be, and then we can use color coding conditions to call out, do we have employees that are being underutilized? Do we have employees that are being overutilized or overscheduled? We'll typically see this as a a great tool to pull open if you're doing any any sort of Monday morning, Friday afternoon scheduling meeting. Let's pull this schedule manager open as a team. Let's work through our team to see if we have individuals that maybe need adjustments to their schedule to make sure they're not being over or underworked. Let's go through our current projects to make sure that we're building project plans that are gonna put us on track and on budget. You may be doing this type of scheduling today out in, say, Excel, maybe have another, outside scheduling tool that you'd utilize to develop project schedules. What's great about doing this within Azure is that it utilizes all that project and employee information to help us utilize this schedule detail in different ways. So not only are we building a project plan that tracks against the budget, we're keeping track of the time so it's integrated into that time sheet so we understand what we've spent. We're building a plan to help us hit our targets, due dates, and budgets for that project, those individual projects. If we take all this hour detail, the other thing that Azure can leverage is rate schedules in the back end. So we can say based on all the hours that we've planned across all these different projects, if we pull all that data together, we can use that information to produce project workload or or revenue forecast reports. So this is an example of a report that utilizes the scheduled dollar detail from the schedule manager, which is really just, converting those planned hours into dollars. The system does that automatically for you, and it can say, based on all the projects that you have in the system that you have planned, we can give you a sense of what your projected revenue should look like if you follow budget and you follow time frame. So that schedule manager was really built with the idea of of saying, we've taken the time to build a budget. Now let's build a proper project plan to make sure that we know how we intend to spend the money so we're not overspending and we're not over or underworking our people. That data then can aggregate into more of this sort of macro level reporting where we can say, looking across the organization, based on all these plans coming together, what does our workload look like? But if we go the other direction, we say, we've taken the time to build out these proper schedules for all of our team members. Let's make sure that our team has an understanding of where they're expected to be working. So all that project plan and schedule detail can also show up on an employee's dashboard. Employees might have a view like this my timesheets dashboard that can show them. This is what your schedule looks like. In this case, for the next six weeks. You can go as short or as long as you as you wish. Schedule manager will let you plan up to two years in advance. In this case, we're showing the next six weeks to show an employee, these are the projects that we expect you to be working on, the phases within that project that we expect you to be working on. These are the hours that we expect you to be working across those different assignments. That rolls up to tell the employee, here's what your projected schedule looks like for the next several weeks. So they have a really good understanding of what the expectation is for them from all of their different project leads, the one or multiple project managers that they might work under. Hopefully, seeing Azure in action gets the wheels turning a bit on how Azure can help your firm either establish or enforce project management best practices, which in turn lead to more successful and profitable projects. Just going back to my earlier point, a big challenge for any growing firm is staying profitable while you scale. Azure is really built to provide this simple but comprehensive set of project reporting that provides really clear project visibility, what you've done, and where you're headed in the future. The resource allocation tools are really important. They just help to ensure that staffing and scheduling is based on a... On an actual plan and not just hoping that you get to the project finish line on time and on budget. The best way to stay on track and on budget is to build a plan that tells you exactly how you're gonna get there. The automation of administrative tasks, we didn't necessarily focus too much on the specifics there, but, hopefully, you get a sense of when you enter data within Azure, you enter it once, and it flows through all these different components. You establish a project budget and a schedule. You do that, scheduling in the schedule manager, and that one piece of information that you've entered flows into all these different components within the system. It's driving revenue forecasting. It's driving employee workload forecasting. It can help give an understanding of capacity. Is your team being over or underworked? It gives a sense of project direction. What have you spent? What do you plan to spend? Are you staying on time and on budget? And you enter time entries once within the system that flows into the project spending. It flows back into the project planning tool. It flows on into client invoicing, one single point of entry that really drives all of those processes. And then everything is tying back back together into simple business insights, really, with the intent of giving firm leaders confidence in where the firm is to date and where they're headed. We're gonna jump into our q and a here in just a moment. Just as a quick note first, if you're a current Azure user or you use another Deltek product, our development team is inviting Deltek users to join our, UX research program, and we wanna give you an opportunity to share your experience with the product's user interface. Tell us how you work, what's working well, maybe where you experience some friction, and just what you need as your business evolves. Those insights really help us make better decisions about product road maps. It also helps us prioritize features as well as what the future experience is gonna look like for users. So if you wanna join this program, you'll have a chance to influence solutions before they're released out to the broader Deltek client base. And we'd also encourage you to invite colleagues who use Deltek maybe in different roles or different workflows or who who utilize different workflows, I should say. Those different perspectives really help us better understand the needs of your organization as a whole. If you'd like to have sort of a voice in what comes next in the Deltek product, you can scan this QR code, and it'll take you to a link to join that that research community. But with all that, let's go ahead and jump into any questions that came up. Alright. So so we had just a few questions that that came in here. It was a question about what that project multiplier is calculating. So there was a callout on the, project performance dashboard that looked at, project multiplier. That is specifically, like, a a net fee multiplier. So so it's looking at, revenue dollars that your project generates per dollar of, raw payroll cost or employee cost. So, typically, firms are looking at that number to get a sense of, you know, are we generating enough revenue per dollar of salary cost on our projects. High performing projects typically sit around a a three to a 3.5 multiplier. If if you're sitting below that, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're not making money, but but maybe not hitting the revenue or margin targets that that you're shooting for. So, typically, a good metric to understand, you know, is your project, trending in the right direction in terms of revenue versus direct cost? There were a couple questions about the schedule manager. So I've tried to address the couple of those. So, one of them was, can we schedule, non project time? So it's like vacations and PTO, and and, yes, you can. Typically, what what you'll do is you'll set up an overhead project for those things like like, vacation projects or or paid time off projects. You can keep track of them hours sort of scheduled on that job out into the future. So if you wanted to plan for someone's upcoming vacation, make sure that that's part of the, you know, the full picture of, the employee's schedule in the in the future. That's that's a great way to approach it. There's a question about when you're in the schedule manager, expanding on, the the projects, not seeing the work breakdown structure for for that job. Typically, what's going on there is is your resources haven't been assigned to the different phases or, like, subphases, within your project. So so if an employee is putting time against that project, you'll be able to see that, individual... That that resource at the job, at the project level, but they won't show up under the phase until you assign them to that phase. So so you might be seeing the hours that are worked. You might have added that resource to the projects, and you might have scheduled out in the future. But if you added that within the schedule manager, everything just gets assigned at the project level. So if you wanna budget and manage budgets down to the to the phase, you you need to start in the... Well, I shouldn't say you need to start. You you typically start in the project command center. The other option is in the schedule manager, you can add resource assignments. You click that kind of the the the blue silhouette button on on the project line, and that would allow you to add resources to a project within the schedule manager. So so, technically, you could do it in the schedule manager or the project command center. Typically, firms are adding those resources when they're initially putting together a project plan, and you do that in the project command center. Give me a second. I'm gonna... A couple more questions to hold on. I wanna read those. So so there's a question about how do you take... How do you get PMs to enter the, hours for each project and maintain that information properly? Yeah. That... That's always a tricky one just in terms of, getting folks to use the system that the way they should the way they should. You know, a lot of that goes back to training and sort of setting the expectations internally that this is the the process that that we follow. At least the best practices, this is how you, should be maintaining and managing projects as as as a PM. I think helpful things that Deltek can do in that regard, we provide project management training kind of boot camps, that that really walk, your PM team through the process of this is how the system is intended to be used. This is why you should use the tools that are, in place. This is how it can help lead to more, say, successful projects. I think a lot of that does start with internal and a culture, you know, setting the expectations on. So project manager, it's your responsibility to to manage and maintain a project plan. Though those tools exist within your project management system within Azure. We can provide, you know, the the training on the proper way to use those. Let's see what else we got here. It's like we're we're probably gonna run out of time, so we may not get to all these questions. What I'll say, just as a quick caveat, if we don't have time to get to your questions live here, we'll follow-up, just via the email after this presentation to make sure we we get those those questions answered offline. And then, yeah, in in terms of more information about, like like, those training sessions, that's all information that you'll have access to within the, the support center, like like, within your, portal to access support. You can get information there. There's also a great link under help just to the Deltek Learning Hub, which has a lot of, good just training courses, available. You you can actually subscribe, employees, like, users within your organization to courses. So so if you wanna subscribe your project management team to, say, the the, you know, the PM courses that are built within the learning hub, that... That's a good first step. If you want more, like, one on one training consultation, that's something that the, the consulting team can help you with so we can actually, you know, schedule a time with a member of our training team. They can get together with with your firm and have more of, like, a kind of a one on one kinda classroom type setting, go through the the, the training boot camp, that project manager boot camp. But, again, we can get you more information on on that as well. So I I think for today, we're gonna conclude the presentation. I'll I'll just... As a quick reminder, if we didn't get to your question live, we'll we'll make sure to follow-up with that, question, directly just offline. You'll have access to this presentation as well here within, twenty four hours. So you'll have a link to the presentation if you wanna share that with any colleagues or just review any of the detail that we covered. I I would say, lastly, just be sure to visit deltek.com if you wanna learn more about upcoming, Deltek events. But with that, I wanna thank everyone for joining the presentation, and we will see you on the next one. Thank you.