Name: KPIs Without Clarity?
Uploaded: 2026-05-12T11:46:11.026Z
Duration: 1 h 8 s
Description: KPIs Without Clarity?

Transcript for "KPIs Without Clarity?": My name is Megan Miller, and I'm a senior director here at Deltek. And we are here to talk about one of my favorite topics, talking about KPIs or key performance indicators. I'm excited today to be joined by Claire Burden who is a partner at S and W. So welcome, Claire. Happy to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. So let's take a look at the agenda quickly and some of the things that we are going to be covering today. So we've got a lot to cover in this. Lots of great content for all of you to help you to bring more clarity into your KPIs. So we've talked a little bit about who we are, and we're gonna dive into the project life cycle and what that means, how analysis is a key part of that, some challenges with analysis, and then diving into some of those KPIs specifically. I get asked a lot what are those key areas that we really should be focused on. So we're gonna share some insight both from what I have seen in the industry as well as from Claire's perspective, looking both at those top five, but also looking forward and some of those KPIs that are less, looking in the rearview mirror, but more a look into what's coming and the importance of bringing those two together. Claire's also gonna share some new approaches and tips that she has seen from working with many companies just like yours, and then we will have time for questions at the end. So, again, throughout this session, if you have questions, go ahead and put those in the chat. If there's some things that are specific that, we won't answer here, we don't have time to, we will make sure that you get answers to those questions. So go ahead and get those questions in at any point during this, and and we will address those as we get time at the end. So I'm gonna turn it over to you, Claire, and just have you give a little bit of an overview of who S and W is just for context for our team here. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Megan. S and W is a mid tier professional services firm. We help clients in this sector specifically with, audit, tax, accounting, and and wider consulting advice. So I look after the consulting practice. We've got a 120 people across The UK, helping businesses fix issues and grow. And KPI is obviously such a fundamental part of that. So I'm here today to to help on that front. Great. Thanks so much. And then just giving a little bit of perspective for some that, may not be as familiar with Deltek. So we think about project based businesses, particularly those in the a and e space, the architecture and engineering space. Firms rely on Deltek to power project success at every stage of the project life cycle. So whether firms are looking to find and win more contracts, improving projects and resource planning, execute on those projects, to do that more efficiently, so that you can protect margins, you can improve profitability. You know, really, Deltek is helping firms of all sizes and all complexities to deliver better projects and ultimately help grow your business, which is what we're really all here for. Right? So a key aspect of this project life cycle, though, is analyze. And when you have better data throughout the entire project life cycle, throughout that billing process, it's really going to help you know where you need to focus, what needs to be a key part of your business strategy, so that you can make better, more informed decisions that ultimately can help your company achieve your goals. So when we look at what we what a graphic that you see here analyzes at the end of the project life cycle, but we know that this is absolutely essential at every single stage of this process. During when, what are you learning? During plan, what are you learning? Azure executing, Azure billing, what are you learning? So that, this is not intended to be a one time thing. Just, you know, once we do every once a year, every quarter, this is happening constantly and helping us to better understand what's happening so that we can deliver better outcomes. So as we look at some of this, you know, where where we really wanna focus today is on that analyze phase again. So looking at what's happening throughout that project life cycle, what are we tracking? Why are we tracking those specific details? We look at that data, you know, collecting data just for the sake of having data isn't really going to help any of us. It we have to collect it with intention. If we're going to ask people for that information, if we're going to track that information, what do we plan to do with it? How is that going to help us inform future decisions so that we can drive that continuous improvement? We know that we all are looking at the same version of the truth and so that we can really determine what our goal should be. This is more than just looking backwards, and, again, you know, we'll dig into that a little bit more. But what should our targets be? Are our goals too high? Are they too aggressive? Are they not aggressive enough? This really should help us determine what the path is for the business, for the segment, for the project, for the client, all of those different elements moving forward. So, this is really the way that you can help your businesses just be more successful. And, for those high performing firms, this is critically important to that. So, Claire, anything that you would wanna add to that in terms of, you know, why this focus on analysis and and really the the core of what we're talking about today? Yeah. I think my, segment builds real, focus, right, on the key things which are important to the business, the key things that drive profitability and performance and client satisfaction. And it's making sure that those are, accentuated and pulled out and really focused on rather than looking at everything, all data. Like, Megan, you were saying with, you know, we we don't want to just gather loads of data and look at look at loads of it for the sake of it. It's thinking about distilling down into some key areas which really make a big difference to your organization. So that's what we'll be looking at today, I think. Absolutely. And with that, you know, there there is the opportunity for many people to get into analysis paralysis is what I like to call this. So, you know, we're overthinking. We're stalling decisions. There's so much data that you could spend forty, fifty, whatever hours a week just running through reports. Right? We get these reports that come out of our systems, and we can just pour through that all the time over and over. But if we don't have a focus and we don't have a purpose for looking at that information, then it just becomes paralyzing. There's so much data. We don't know where to focus. We just continue to analyze. We're worried about making the wrong decisions. We're really not looking at, you know, where we have those opportunities to move things forward. So it slows everything down. We miss those opportunities for momentum. People start to have their energy drained. There's there's decisions that are unresolved, and it just really starts to weigh on people that we've got all this information, and it just becomes so overwhelming, especially for those engineers that by nature are really analysis driven. Right? So they're really focused on the numbers and focusing on the details. So how can you help your teams to be able to come into that middle ground of not necessarily way down in the weeds in that analysis paralysis, but not too high level where it's not meaningful and impactful for your business. So that way we can make those decisions, make them quickly. Part of that is also having data that you trust. So if you don't trust the information that you have about your project performance, about your, success of winning projects, about your billing and timing of all of those things, then that's gonna make this even more challenging because you spend half the time questioning whether the data is right and then analyzing it. So at the core of all of this is really making sure that you have solid data, solid data practices so that you have reliable information on a regular basis so that you can make better decisions. So, Claire, I really wanna dig in now into, you know, one of the questions that you get, one of the questions I get of we talk about KPIs. There's so many options. So where do how do we determine what are some of those top KPIs that, that we should focus on? So I'm gonna let you just kinda give an overview of this a little bit in terms of, you know, the top five and why you would look at these as really the top five for these the architecture engineering consulting firms. Yes. So I think, one of the key things that we see in the sector with our client base is that, we've got a bunch of highly intelligent people working across the organization, all focused on, a lot of the right things. But because of that, because of that kind of mind that's that's focused on, quantifying and thinking about lots of data, that's why we started with that analysis paralysis. It's, that can be often the key thing that can pull focus away from some of the, key performance indicators. So that's why we call them KPIs because you need a handful which are just the absolute focus of the organization. And when you have that level of simplicity, it's hard to get to. And the the KPIs that you select could change over time. But often, the the few that you do pick and and we typically say, you know, three to seven KPIs, so five is perfect for for this discussion. The ones that you do pick work in collaboration with each other. So we'll come back on to in a bit more detail about how actually you shouldn't think of one one KPI in isolation because it can drive you down slightly the wrong path. It's about thinking about how holistically they work together. But that simplicity is actually really difficult to get to, hence why we're talking about it today. So the the five that we've picked in terms of those those real kind of, key focus for this sector, we see them across lots of different clients in in the space, and they're the kind of core ones that we would go to as a as a basis for looking at. Operating profit on net revenue. So that helps us understand how valuable each pound, of revenue we are bringing in is in terms of generating profit. And for organizations that have a real mix of different project types, so you might have some higher, volume, lower margin type projects, and then you might have some really niche high high value work. You can really use that operating profit measure to think about how your mix of work might be changing, what that means in terms of cash conversion, where you invest your money, where you get your returns, you know, where you focus on growing importantly as well. Because if you have a low operating profit on net revenue, it means that it's suck it's sucking up an awful lot of kind of working capital to be able to fund that bit of the business. So we think that that's quite a key interesting one to focus on. And then running through the rest of them before we come back to think about the whole piece. So the overhead rate, is a really interesting one because we need to make sure that, as an organization, the overhead cost of the business really matches the size of the organization in terms of the projects that you're delivering for your clients. And so that's thinking about things like not, that the over overhead rate should be zero because you would never want to kind of lose that critical mass in the organization to make, you know, you need you need money for, the finance function and marketing and business development and those kind of things. But it's it's really making sure that those are contained and managed relevant to the size of the business. So that's that's an absolute key one to be focusing on, particularly at the board level in the A and E sector. Then utilization rates. We are all generally people businesses. So there's a really big focus on making sure that the people that we've got in the organization at the different levels are, properly utilized, that we're effectively sharing them between different teams. If you've got some teams which are busy, some teams which are quiet, and you're operating in some slight silos where you can't really tell, there's a really big opportunity to look at the utilization rate. Like you were saying, Meaghan, between different departments or different project types, you can kind of start to move resource around the organization or think about, how that could be improved. One of the things that I've been helping a client with recently in this sector is thinking about utilization in terms of hiring and hiring plans. So we're looking at utilization trends over time. We're looking at, whether we sign off on, you know, request to hire new roles compared to the utilization that we're seeing in the teams. Are those teams overheated and overworking? Or, actually, is there already capacity that we could be more efficiently using, to then become more profitable over time? So utilization is a a a really key one. The project margin one as well plays into all of these three that we've just been discussing. So what we need to do is make sure that we not only look at the at the firm level, operating profile, and net net revenue, but we look at the individual project margin. And that's over time as well. So when you think about, when you commence the project all the way through, you know, from pricing all the way through to when you're delivering and when you finished it, there are feedback loop points at all of those different stages to get the project back on track. Often, we get called into clients to help where the mix of projects and the, you know, there's more to spend that's not being recouped. Or there's, you know, if it's a long term contract over many years, the inflation agreement in the contract isn't quite right, so the costs are growing higher than the higher than the revenue. There's lots of opportunity around that to kind of resteer the project margin back onto track, and it's important to look at it as you go through the project to make sure that you're not waiting till the end and then realizing you've got problems because these can be really big fundamental projects to the business as everyone in this sector knows working on them already. And then the last one, employee turnover rate. So, again, people businesses. It's not just thinking actually about wanting to always have a very, very low employee turnover rate. So one of the clients that I've been doing a a kind of strategy and succession planning projects with, in recent months, they've actually got the issue where they've had a really, really low employee turnover rate for many years, and it's caused them a slight issue in that they don't have succession planning. They don't have many, much fresh blood coming into the organization. They can't really see what's happening in other industries or other other competitive firms, because they're not having that flow of people coming in and saying, actually, best practice that I had was, you know, I was quite AI enabled or tech enabled in this other organization, and we could bring some of that into this company. So there's an opportunity as well to to, have a have a kind of optimal balance of employee turnover, depending on your organization and where you are in your maturity and life cycle. Absolutely. Let's dig into each of these. I think that's a great summary of all of these, Claire, and I really appreciate that. And I would just wanna dig into each of these a little bit more and look at some examples and, you know, just talk about them a little bit. So for people that may not be as familiar, you know, we provided a little bit more context here on the screen. We're not gonna go through, obviously, and read all of the detail, but, you know, when we look at operating profit on net revenue, you know, what are some things that as as you're thinking about for a firm that, they may have been tracking this for a while, but what are some things that you would say are are key to be focused on in this rather than just, again, reporting the number? Here's what it is. But what should we be looking for in this? What kind of trends that we should be monitoring to help people see? Do they need to adjust this lever one way or the other? Yep. Lots of my clients in this space are currently thinking about, external investment, whether they're thinking about private equity or, you know, selling their business eventually. There's there's lots, of discussion around that that kind of how you how you get investment into your organization. Operating profit and net revenue is a key trend that's looked at by any investor that's coming in. So some of our clients are looking at the trend over time and seeing how, if it's obviously on a on a a declining or flat trend, you're gonna get less value for your business, less investment, less opportunity for your business to grow, less cash flow generation. Whereas if it's if it's going up up on an upwards trajectory, it's obviously, much more valuable, and you can kind of get a higher return, for the sale of your business. But, really, for me, the key thing that we do when we're helping clients, look at this number is think about it from a few different lenses. So it's thinking about the trend over time, the future, where it's going. Because, obviously, if you know that something's happened over the last twelve or twenty four twenty four months, which isn't going to be recurring, then you can model out what it looks like going forward depending on your current project portfolio, what you've got what you've got coming up. So I think the forward look is really, really important to think about what you would then do to increase, increase that operating profit. And, also, the other area where, we work with a lot of businesses is around the mix of operating profit. So where is your operating profit coming from? So is it coming from a couple of key profitable contracts? And then, actually, if those if those projects are ending in the next month or two or year or two, then you've got only what happens. Right? Coming down the road. Yeah. Yeah. So so it's using it and thinking about these KPIs with with a different lens to, to think how do they work in context of the whole operating environment of the business, and also as a benchmarking point as well. So this is a KPI that's really easy to find out for your competitors as well. We have lots of information, obviously, publicly available where you can see operating profit, and net revenue. So we can see four competitor organizations where your firm sits compared to others. And you can think, actually, if we have a similar mix of work, a similar type of project to a certain competitor, and they've got loads more operating profit on net revenue than you have, then then there's an issue there that you could, or an opportunity, we like to say, to improve rates and start to dig into that a little bit more. And I think one of the you know, some of what you're saying here, one of the biggest things with all of these KPIs is to not just look at the number, but to really dig into the why. So, you know, if those numbers have changed, did they change on purpose? Did they change unexpectedly? Are there outside factors Like you said, there may be things that have happened in the last twelve months that are not expected moving forward. Are there changes in the business on purpose where maybe there's some impacts now because we're trying to break into a new market? We're trying to work with some new clients, but we need to think about how that's gonna evolve over time. And it's really understanding the story around this data on a regular basis. So while you may have some peaks and valleys throughout the year, if you compare q one of this year to q one of last year, are they similar? Q two and q two, q two and q one. Like, there's a lot of different ways to analyze these to see where there's trends, where there's concerns. It's not always as clear cut as just the linear look. But what are the different ways that you need to look at this data so that you can understand where there might be bright spots in your company, but where there's also some challenges that, that we need to dig into a little bit more? So, so let's look at the overhead rate. I know this is always one that becomes, you know, a a big topic of discussion and sometimes a little controversial in in terms of what we want for overhead rate. To your point, we don't want 0%. But how do we make sure that we've got that right balance, that we're doing what we need to? And and from my perspective and conversations that I have had, with companies in this industry, you know, in some cases, again, understanding the why, if that overhead rate is higher than what it has been in the past, again, is it on purpose? Is it because there's investment in your people? You're asking them to do more training. You've brought on some more marketing and business development teams because you have very focused goals that you need to achieve, and that's what you need to do to be able to reach those goals. So sometimes there's places where the overhead rate may be higher because you're stretching on purpose, right, and trying to achieve a certain goal. It's the one that you don't want there to be surprises where all of a sudden our overhead rate is not where we thought it was and or maybe we don't have people as utilized as we need them to be. And that that's where you just don't want some things to pop up here that that, you know, weren't expected. So, what else, Claire, from your perspective to add into that from an overhead perspective? I think, the key things that clients are asking about that we're talking about when it comes to overhead rates are, one, tech enablement. So how can we use tech more efficiently? How can we make work less manual? You know, how can we how can we use tools and, data visualization and and all the great, all the great things that we have open and available to us, to really minimize the amount of time that people are spending and to, therefore, make the business a bit more efficient. So there's a big kind of AI and technology push, to to help improve overhead rate. Obviously, there's a bit of investment of time upfront, and there's, a different level of return sometimes with, with tech investment. So in terms of when you're automating processes and things. So there's a lot to think about there. But, but one of the things that we're seeing actually is a general shift, down in overhead rates, where organizations are both tightening belts and then also, using technology to to invest. The other thing I've seen, and I've talked about a lot with clients with overhead rates, is, how we can get them, bought into a calculation in terms of when we're thinking about return on investment, when we're thinking about where do we place our money, particularly when we're talking about, marketing and business developments there, Megan. So to your point, if you're if you're looking at, wanting to grow the business and wanting to launch into a new, you know, a new kind of type of service or, type of work, that that's really important to think about, the return on investment and then the impact that that investment is going to have on your overhead rate because a lot of that spend isn't spend that you can capitalize in in the, you know, onto your balance sheet. It's it's spend that goes through your overheads. So you have a kind of cost dip before you have the improvement later. And it's knowing that bridge of what's what's kind of exceptional or one off or or just current for the moment, and what's the underlying business, doing in terms of overhead costs. But it is really important to keep under control. We see, lots of organizations where we we go in to help them with kind of organizational redesign, particularly to the back office where sometimes it just inflates out of control over a very long time without much focus. So it's not that we're really trying to avoid here. It's kind of getting minds and focus back on that cost versus the size of your business. Absolutely. And I think a couple of things to add into that. Right? So if we look at overhead, all of the things that you've talked about with the tech enablement, especially with this big focus on AI, but there are some really simple things too. Right? So making sure that your teams are tracking their time appropriately to projects so you know where time is really being spent. Do you have the right tools to make that easy for them so that we know where people are spending time or not spending their time? And is it true data, or is it I'm putting things where I want them to from a billing, but it's it's not really telling me the full story of what's happening in the business? So I think that's a key part where, you know, all the efficiency gains that we have through technology are critically important, but also making sure that we're using the tools that we have to make capturing time, processing, billing as efficient as we can because those tools, even in the last five years, are tremendously different, much more automation, much better workflows to really be able to empower those back office teams to get those bills out faster, be able to get feedback from project managers where they need to. And then from an overhead perspective, right, if if there are companies that are struggling with where those overhead rates are and they need to lower them, this is a place where it's really important to understand the details behind it because I have seen too many companies in the past as a marketer at heart myself that have said, well, we need to over lower the overhead rate. We'll just remove marketing staff. The downstream impacts of that are tremendously negative. Right? So thinking about the impacts of that, where are the other places that we can look to improve overhead without just saying overhead functions in general need to be reduced? There's probably some other places that that we need to dive into. So as a marketer at heart, where I've seen that happen to people over the years, I would implore all of you. Do not start with we need to reduce overhead by reducing just staff and positions because there are big negative impacts to that across the business. So so let's look at utilization. This really ties in well with, you know, what we just talked about. And, again, focusing on that time sheet recording, which seems so basic and seems so easy, but it is still one of the biggest problems that we have across the industry, that we hear a lot from, from our clients of just, you know, being able to capture that, capture it accurately, capture it efficiently, make it so that it doesn't take as much time. People don't wanna fill out their time sheets. But it's so, so important. And I think when it comes to KPIs, one of the opportunities to have discussions both with your design staff as well as your project managers, if they're not as financially savvy, which we'll talk a little bit more about that in a little bit, is to help them understand why this is so important. That this hour charged to this project, how does that impact everything else? Like, you get paid because you're tracking time that ultimately goes to the client. They pay their bills. We pay you. So some people just don't understand. Like, why are you asking me to put all these things on my time sheet? Why is this so important? So helping them to understand the implications of that, I think, is really important, especially as new people are coming into the business, as new people are coming into the industry that just may not have that kind of context. Yeah. And culture is so important there. Right? So, we see loads of businesses where you have this whack a mole, system that happens between, a push to record all of your time, and then everybody puts all of their time down to the client code as they properly should. And then, you know, then it can kind of throw out project margins. So then, there's a bit of a push, where where the employees feel like they shouldn't put all of their time down because they're going to have to manage the project margin number. And then you end up having a an issue with recovery of of time. And, there there's a real, there's a real kind of interplay, like a seesaw moment between the two. And I think having a strong culture of, clarity. So just reporting the true facts, not having something we we often see, something called double discounting quite a lot where you have an employee not wanting to put too much time on their time sheet down to a specific project. If they feel like they spent a bit too long, they were doing some training during it, they were, you know, they were not confident about about, being able to charge all of all of that time to the client. But then you can have the manager review when they go to bill, and they knock some time off as well. And then you have this double discount problem, which is a real issue for the firm because that can take off some of the top slice of profitability for that project. So Great. There's there's a piece around, the culture and making sure that everybody also is, confident about the value that those hours are adding to the project and that they are all, you know, valuable for the client and that they really should be recovered. I think that's that kind of confidence in the business and the value of the business that it's bringing. Yeah. I think going into this, right, it's it's back to that conversation of what is it that you want your data to tell you? What's the story that you're looking for? So do you want your time sheets purely done to help billing, or do you want the time sheets to really help you understand how people are using their time? So there's a very big difference between true utilization rate and what I have from a billing utilization rate. So back to your point of the culture, what's the culture and the expectation that you're setting? I have seen firms in the past where, you know, you don't bill any overhead time until you've hit your forty hours of utilization, and then you can charge overhead or then you can charge overtime or then you can but the person's still doing the work, and you need to know where those people are spending their time so that if they are about to burn out, if they're working all these crazy hours, do you have that captured so that you can really make the best business decisions? So really separating that true utilization rate from a billing utilization, how do you get both so that you can understand what's happening, which I think Claire goes really nicely into the project margins. Right? So how do we look at that profitability and looking at those, not only at the project level, which you talked about before and understanding throughout that project, but one of the things that that I was thinking about as you were talking about that is having these project margins, especially for repeat clients, can really help you better position for the next project. Like, hey. We didn't hit the margins we wanted to on this one. What do we need to do differently to set expectations on this one? Part of that goes back to tracking the time, tracking what you need to. So you know we thought this was going to take a hundred hours. It actually took a hundred and fifty. This is a similar project. We need to plan better for our teams going into this project than maybe what we did for the last one. So there's a lot that we can look at in here to help your teams better understand what's happening in these projects, where are things going well, where are they maybe not going well, where do we need to make some adjustments to your point during the project, but then using that to help set us up for similar projects with other clients, more projects with the same client, but really using that intel to make better decisions on future work too. Yep. And there there's a real opportunity here for organizations to think about the project margin alongside the customer journey in terms of how the customer is is perceiving the value of the project and, that whole the kind of life cycle as you go through. And one of the things that we see clients really, really, use as a valuable lever to improve their project margin is when they do, kind of internal training programs on, recording a proper scope of work, and making sure that that then is kind of matched against and that the managers are really, really clear on when you've gone above and beyond and when you've done additional out of scope out of scope items, and then having those conversations live with the clients. So it's almost like a negotiation training, like a like a making your client updated and and sharing that information with the client on a on a real time basis so that then the client doesn't get to the end of the project and then have a differing expectation of the the cost, that they're about to be charged, and you don't end up having these big debates at the end. You can have it real time through the project. And the live project margin really helps you, understand that and start to have, in management meetings, for example, if you bring these up and you're talking about them as part of your kind of live interactions with with staff and teams across the firm, you can then, make sure that those are targeted real time. So there there's this opportunity as well to make sure that you you've got the opportunity side where you can you can get more revenue, you can improve your project margin, you can recoup losses. And then there's also the risk mitigation side. So if you can see things starting to go wrong, you can think, what can we do to correct? And and particularly looking back at historic projects, particularly by service line, and and seeing where the outliers were. So it's it's your point, Megan, around, you know, where can we learn from things where they haven't quite gone right? What do we do differently next time? And having a really good feedback loop, we've it can be quite easy to forget to do that when you have the end of a project. You kind of have a quick debrief and then you move on to the next one. But but making sure that you really learn those valuable lessons is important. Well, I think even looking at this one. Right? This is this is a great example of where if you have project managers that are really only focused on schedule and delivery and design, you're not gonna be able to get what you need to hear. You have to have a plan in your company. And if you don't have this today, this will be one of the biggest takeaways that I would say from from this, is to help your project managers make it a priority for your company this year with your project managers to help them be more financially savvy. If they're not responsible for the financial outcomes of the project and that's just somebody in the back office's problem, they can't help mitigate that before you get to the end of the project. They have to understand what is the target for profitability on this. What is a margin we're trying to get to and track that along the way with finances support, obviously, those back office teams working alongside of them. But you really need to invest the time for your project managers to not just be design savvy, not just be able to manage schedules, but really understand again, also not just the upfront budget. They're really good at putting together that scope and the the estimate at the beginning. But how is that playing out in real time? And did we hit the margin? Did we do we understand why those cost estimates need to be what they are so that we can hit the profit margin, not just so we can win the work? And so helping them, we've seen in some of, we do some Delta Clarity benchmarking reports. And one of the things that we have seen from our financial leaders in terms of one of their biggest challenges in their perspective is having project managers be financially savvy. It's also one of their biggest opportunities that they see in the next eighteen months. So that's not on your radar. It's probably on your financial leaders' radar if that's not you. So that's really something to think about in this is all of these metrics that we've talked about and then some. Where where should your project managers understand this? That it's not just the finance team's problem. It's not just the accounting team's problem, but they really have to lean in and understand some of these as well. So let's look at the last one here, employee turnover. I know we talked a little bit about this, before, Claire, and the and the importance of this. So anything else that you would like to add in from, from a turnover perspective? Yeah. So I guess the key, the key thing here is, you know, that midpoint that I said around making sure that it's not too high, not too low, you know, just right Goldilocks porridge level. But the the key thing actually for me is around segmenting properly. So understanding, you know, you can use employee turnover to think about, do you lose, good people when they reach a certain level within your organization? Are we are we losing, DNI and divestiture and inclusion, you know, different groups of people at certain points? Are we are we really focused on, the right l and d path for people, learning and development? So I think there's a piece around making sure that the mix of people that you've got in the organization is the right mix and going forward that you're building that right mix in the in the right way in terms of skill set, seniority, attributions, all the different things. And I think employee turnover is a really key area where you can make sure that you're managing that alongside your hiring strategy. Because, obviously, if you're bringing loads of great people in the door but then you're losing them, and then you've got some, you know, less good people who are staying, you can have you can have a slightly different issue. So, so for me, it's about thinking how can you segment your employee turnover rate to understand, if there's a certain you know, there might be a certain team or manager that, that isn't operating very effectively. That's what I was just gonna add in, that it might be a there might be a problem spot, right, that you need to address. And everybody that reports to this manager is leaving. We I need to we do I need to focus on that manager or that particular, maybe not that person, but what's happening in that part of the business that we need to dive into a little bit more? Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's a really good it's a kind of hygiene factor, the employee turnover rate. It's like the alarm warning early warning sign for things that can be going culturally wrong in an organization. That's that's a really heavily kind of people led business. So it's it's a really that's kind of why we put it as number one. You know, your your business is your people and making sure that you've got the right mix of them and that they're working well, I think, is is absolutely critical. Yep. Absolutely. And I think, you know, all of these that we've talked about so far, right, are really back looking. They're they're looking in the rearview mirror, things that have already happened. This one, I think, will lead us into some of the looking forward, which we didn't really put this one in, but I'm gonna throw it in as a little bit of a before. We've seen a lot of companies too that, you know, employee turnover rate oftentimes you know, it's always an after the fact. People have already left. So what can your company be doing ahead of that? Like, where are those pulse checks? Where are those opportunities to see how people are feeling in a place that they feel safe enough to be honest and a place that they feel like they can be transparent? That if there are issues with a particular part of the business, people don't see those opportunities, that you know that before it's too late. Once they leave, it's gonna be too hard to get them back. And if they're regrettable attrition, they're people you really saw as leaders in your company. You need to have a way in your business to not just look at the employee turnover rate after it happened, but what are those things that you have in place from an engagement perspective in your company today to get that pulse, see what's happening, have those conversations, sit down with some employees that seem like they're not just not as engaged as they have been, and and look for opportunities to get ahead of these before it negatively impacts your attrition rate in a way that you weren't expecting. So, with that, we're also gonna look at some, other KPIs that are more, you know, forward looking, that are leading indicators that we need to be monitoring in conjunction with the the traditional KPIs that are more lagging indicators. So we just love, Claire, for you to walk through some of these and and talk about, some of these and why they're so critical in some of the conversations that you have had with your clients. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So cash flow, key fundamental for, for all of the businesses in this sector. We see lots of cash flow, kind of crunch points or issues where actually with great cash flow forecasting, great cash flow planning, they could have been easily avoided. And it's all it's all things that can be that can be sorted out with enough, knowledge and and kind of foresight. So And with better data, right, gotta have the right data in there to be able to not just say, I think we might do this, but real data, real information to really see what's happening in the business. So Exactly. Yeah. And the financial leaders will be will be alive to this conversation. You know, they're managing the cash flow of the organization day to day. But I think it's about making it more widely understood and with eyes on it, on a wider basis. So, for example, one of my clients, has implemented more of a visibility on, how how that kind of width and, and time spent on the clock when we were talking about utilization and and time, you know, time put down on time sheets, how that can then sit there and then how it makes it through the way through the billing cycle and then through to being paid. And there's been an education process in one of my clients where, we've really taken all the project managers through that journey to say, do you realize it's, like, six months, really, between this start date and this finish date? And if we can get it down to five months, we'll have an extra x amount in the business to be able to fund our working capital, to be able to grow. And it's a really positive thing that, actually, the project managers appreciate hearing and understanding. And And so it's that piece that can bring together the operational part of your business and the financial part to make you kind of aligned and thinking about what you're doing. So cash flow is a really, really fundamental one. Yeah. We always talk about that in terms of, you know, same kind of thing, walking people through, like, how does an hour become a dollar or a pound. Right? Like, what's the process? And through that, where are the bottlenecks? Where are things falling apart? Are there billing reports that's sitting on somebody's desk for three weeks? Are there like, where can we speed up that process so that we get from that one hour I spent on the job to actually being paid for the work that was done? So that, I think, is always a great opportunity to educate people on that that whole process, but with the mindset of where are their inefficiencies? Where do we fix this? Where are things going wrong in this that, to your point, we can we can make this a little bit tighter. So many easy wins. I mean, you know, before e billing, it used to be if there were invoices that were all printed off and hadn't been posted yet for four days. And it you know, it's that kind of really really really really technology comes in too. Right? There's the systems that you have in place, for those that are using Deltek systems. Right? Like, we have, electronic review and approvals of invoices and markups and and being able to do, workflows for approvals of timesheets and all of that. So if you're not using the technology, that's a huge opportunity to speed up a process like that and save a tremendous amount of time without having to really do much, but letting the technology run the process for you so that you're not chasing people around the office. You're not sending a 100 emails and where is this? Where is this? Where is this? Right? But, like, really helping letting the technology find those opportunities for efficiency, is is a big place where companies really can focus. Absolutely. And then in terms of new work pipeline, so, obviously, key lifeblood as a business is in bringing in new opportunities. And so, obviously, everybody's very focused on the kind of traditional sales funnel, thinking about how that's coming through. So, number of client meetings, for example, or meetings with targets, numbers of new opportunities coming into the top of that sales funnel, How can you measure those? There's loads of cool tech now, where you can kind of pull some of that information, very easily from Outlook, another another kind of, you know, meeting invites and things. And then you can go all the way through the sales funnel, looking at pursuits, proposals, all the way through to contracts signed. And it's really interesting to look at some of that data, again, with a few different lenses. So you can think about, you know, other certain teams within the organization who are who are busy and selling more and have more opportunities. And then, therefore, do you need to think as a leading indicator? Are you thinking about, scaling up those teams and making sure that you've got the resource available or moving people from other bits of the organization to go and help them so that they're ready, trained up, ready to go? It helps you also spot market opportunities. So we do some analysis with clients where we look at, the different types of leads and pursuits and and their mix of work and how it's changing from a very front end perspective in terms of what the market's asking for. You know, what kind of services your clients are asking for, and then therefore, how can you organize your business now to be ready for tomorrow's client demand? So there's loads of interesting I mean, I'm I'm a real data geek, so I love the conversion stats on different types of pursuit and opportunity and things like that. Really big opportunity to do that. The the things that are draining your resources. Right? So when I was in, a marketing position and and was managing our CRM, this is one of the things that we would do is, you know, you've got project managers who have those client relationships, and they're saying this this client really wants to work with us. They really wanna work with us. And and I was able to bring forward and say, we've lost the last eight pursuits with them. So they obviously don't wanna work with us that much if we like, we keep submitting. It's taking a ton of time. We're not winning. So either we have to change something or maybe we just need to fire the client and realize this is not a good fit for us. Right? So making those decisions on what we should pursue, but really using this to figure out what we should stop pursuing. And the things that go on the stop doing list, the clients we shouldn't pursue, all of that, I think, is is can really come out of this as well. Yeah. And that's a really big theme, I think, Megan, across the piece. Because if we look at, you know, what you could stop doing, it it goes back to a lot of the other KPIs as well in terms of utilization, stopping doing lots of internal meetings that aren't actually generating that much value or, you know, looking at, overhead rate and what you could be stopping doing in terms of some reporting internally that nobody ever looks at, that kind of thing. That's not really there's there's loads of opportunity across across organizations. Yes. All of those inefficiencies. Absolutely. Yep. And then the last one, I guess, the change order frequency. So, thinking again about, the client experience, the customer journey, and how, how projects evolve over time. Change orders, obviously, there's loads of variations happening all the time in different projects. Are there actually some great people in your business who are really good at effectively upselling and onselling? So a change order is a great thing where you're adding and you're actually selling more and improving. Or is it an issue where you've got scope creep and you're not actually recovering the level? So you might be doing a change order, but not for very much more money, which is a problem. So you can have it it can be like that kind of risk or opportunity, and it's looking at the data to see actually what's happening. Do we have certain clients who are, putting through lots of change orders? And then, therefore, did we really scope upfront what what they actually needed, or have we kind of misscoped and over time we're having to fix? And is that an issue for the client in terms of their experience and then, you know, willingness to buy future projects from us? So it's this whole, like, how how you use the data with the lens of of the client view, I think, is really, really important. Absolutely. So we have a little bit of time here left. We've got a couple more slides that I wanna get through in terms of, you know, we've looked back, we've looked forward. So how do we kind of bring these together? And so looking at these, I'm gonna walk through a couple of these updating the the approach. And then, Claire, we'll have you share some of the tips that you have for teams so that we still have some time here for questions and, and we can hear from some of our participants here. So, so a couple of things when we're looking at how to update your approach to KPIs. You know, you you we're all probably in different positions in how we do this today and, you know, what do we need to do moving forward? How do we update and refresh and uplevel our approach to KPIs? One of those is to make sure that not only are your, that the the KPIs that you're tracking, how do those, you know, those key ones that we talked about, but how do they align to your overall business strategy? Are you tracking things that are helping you determine if you're hitting your overall goals? And that most of the time needs to be a mix of those lagging and leading indicators. If we're tracking, you know, the the the turnover rate, that's gonna be critically important if we're looking to grow and develop and do succession planning. Right? So what is it tying to in your business goals? All of these KPIs should tie to something that you're trying to achieve in the business. Those leading indicators, a lot of times, they're a lot more subjective. Right? They're harder to quantify, but it's still important for you to define what success looks like. What is it we're looking for? What are we trying to measure? It may not be as clear cut as the utilization rate that we calculated and do all of that, but what do you want to achieve? What do you wanna set it up as that target? And then as you had talked about previously, Claire, doing that KPI tracking really gives you the opportunity to then look outside of your business. If this is our utilization number, is that in line with what we've seen in other parts of the business? And and, you know, we've talked before about utilization is a great one where if you ask any accounting finance person, they would love to see a 100% utilization. That's not a benchmark that we should be working towards because you're gonna have burned out staff. Nobody's ever gonna get take time off. There's but where's the right balance? It's hard sometimes to know that. We've always set our target a certain way, but maybe that's not what we're seeing in the industry because of training, investment, all these other things that we need to focus on. So, looking at that outside lens, especially if you have people that have been there for a long time, how do we how do we transition that? And then making sure that you have that single source of truth. Where is that one place that you're going for all of your data? You're not looking in 14 different systems, but you can look at your project information, your billing information. You're you're putting all of that in one system that's trusted. It's updated, and that is your primary source across the board. So just wanna have you talk a little bit about a couple of these top tips, as we're wrapping up, some of our time here. Yeah. Great. So, I mean, everybody can read read what's on the screen. I think the key is obviously with kind of three key things to think about as a leader in your organization to to really think about how you can how you can fix this. I would say decide and do. So make sure that you've got your set of metrics. Again, not one, a a kind of suite of them that you understand the interplay between, and use them and change what you're doing, embed an action as a result of looking at the metrics. Don't just look at them, do something about them within the organization, change the way you're working, change the way, you know, you make decisions and how you work. So that'd be it's another one for me to decide and do. Item number two, I think, is is around embedding in management meetings, making sure that you're talking about the same KPIs all of the time, making sure that you bring them up. They're very visible. The whole organization sees the same things, and everyone's working to the same, you know, singing to the same hymn sheet effectively. And then the last one is thinking about what's important now, but what's important next. So it's this this suite of KPI is really important. Embed them, but recognize that they can change over time and always think forwards and think what will I need next? What's the strategy for next year, next five years? You know, do we need to embed a KPI around that or starting to step into it? That It would be the key things for me, I think. That's great. Thanks so much for that. So as we wrap up before we get into the questions, if there's anything that we have talked about here today when it we we talked about the technology and the systems that you need to help support that, If there's anything that we can help with from a Deltek perspective in any part of this project life cycle, we'd love to be able to have the opportunity to talk to you about that, whether it's a system you're already using at Deltek and you just wanna make it better, or if you're not using one of our solutions and you're looking for an opportunity to better track your metrics, better track these KPIs, be able to deliver that insight in a more automated way, automate some of those processes like you're billing, any of those, we'd love to be able to have that conversation with you. So as we look at, going into the questions, you may have already put your questions in. If not, go ahead and type those in now. We'll we'll take a few minutes here to answer some of those questions. Before we get into that, though, again, Claire, thank you for your time in this. As people are submitting questions, we do have a quick audience poll that we're going to launch as we have the opportunity to look through some of your questions and figure out which ones we can answer here. So if you can just go ahead and take a few minutes and answer that poll question, we'll be back and answer some of your questions here shortly.