Name: Manage Your Entire Project Lifecycle with Deltek Ajera
Uploaded: 2026-03-21T15:46:06.053Z
Duration: 30 min 8 s
Description: Manage Your Entire Project Lifecycle with Deltek Ajera

Transcript for "Manage Your Entire Project Lifecycle with Deltek Ajera": Hi everyone. Thank you for joining today's presentation, Manage Your Entire Project Lifecycle with Deltek Agira. My name's Ron Dodge. I'm a principal solutions engineer at Deltek. And before we begin, I have a few administrative items to note. First, for the best webinar experience, please use Google Chrome or Firefox for the webinar presentation. Also, feel free to type any questions you have in the Q and A box at any time during the presentation. We'll do our best to address those at the end. There are resources including the presentation slides available for you to download in the resource panel on your screen. All widgets on the presentation screen can be resized to fit your computer screen. You will also receive an on demand recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours after the webinar ends. Today's presentation is gonna focus on the workflow of managing a project through its life cycle within Delta Kajera. We'll spend the majority of our time working in the Jira, and we'll walk through the process, start to finish, on how to manage projects within the system. When we talk about the project life cycle, Deltec's product strategy likes to focus on five key phases. On top, we talk about the win, so providing a solution that helps you track and manage opportunities through the business development process. Then once you've won a project, we focus on the tools that help you manage the success of that project, building a project plan, managing the resource schedule of your team, making sure you're not over or under utilizing team members, and also making sure you build a project plan that keeps you on track. This dovetails into the development and management of your people, making sure the right team members are on the right projects and are properly utilized. Then delivering a successful project that finishes on time and on budget with tools like earned value management and integrated financial management, all to help streamline and simplify processes like client invoicing, and then rounding things out with powerful dashboard reporting tools to help measure progress and success of jobs. For our workflow in Azure, we'll start with tracking potential projects using business development tools, then we'll build an estimate or a project plan for the project. We'll look at the resource scheduling features within Azure, then show you what an employee sees when they log in and how they can enter time. We'll take a look at dashboard reporting and show you how you can measure your project's progress, and we'll wrap up with issuing an invoice to a client. So with that, let's go ahead and jump into Azure. I'm currently logged into Azure as a project manager, and we'll keep the focus primarily for today's presentation through the lens of a PM, though the processes and steps can remain relatively the same for administrative users or other members of your team that might be involved in the project process. This is a dashboard view that a project manager may see when they log in to Azure, and it's focusing primarily on project metrics that we want our PMs to pay attention to. From this dashboard, we can initiate the process of creating a new project. Any project based dashboard widget can include the ability to create a new project. So for this example, let's assume a project manager has a new lead or opportunity they want to input into the system. They start by creating a new project. When they create a new project, there are a few options they can choose from. You can create a new project from scratch. You can copy from an existing project if you have a contract that you've done in the past that's similar. And along those same lines, you can create a project from a template. If there's consistency in the different types of contracts that you create, this can be a good option to simplify the project creation process, save a little bit of data entry time, setting up a new job. We'll pick one of our templates, we'll create a new project. It's gonna launch a window we call the project command center. This project command center is where all of your new project information gets created or defined. For preliminary projects, opportunities, or proposals that you're in pursuit of, You'll want to start that project with the status of preliminary, and this tells Azure that this is a project that you're still in pursuit of. You'll give your project a name. We'll call this our new sample project. At this point, you might choose to identify a project number. For many firms, they'll start projects with a proposal number, if it's a contract they haven't been awarded yet, and they'll convert this to an active project number should they win the project. We won't fill out every bit of detail, but we might define things like what's the type of project, who's the project manager, who's the principal in charge. This may be information that we know now, or if this is a a an in pursuit project, this might be information that we need to come back and fill in later. At this point, we might know who our client is or who that potential client is. This client field is a lookup to your client database. So if you're doing work with a repeat client, can pick that client from the list. If it's a new client that you're working with, you can create a new client record at this point as well. For our example, we'll assume that this is work with a repeat client and we'll just pick one from the list. At this point in the pursuit process, we may not know what our billing type is. This is information that can be updated later as we get closer to winning our project. For our example, we'll treat this as a project that we're going to bill on a time and expense basis. An important step for projects that are in a preliminary state, if you wish to utilize the business development tools within Azure, you'll create a phase on your project that carries a status of marketing. I've chosen to name this my business development phase. The status of marketing tells Azure that this is a non billable phase. It gives us a place to track pursuit or business development information that's related to this pursuit project. It also gives a place for employees to track time and track the cost that goes into trying to win a project that you're in pursuit of. If you notice this tab shows up labeled business development. This only shows up when you have a phase with the status of marketing. Within business development, you can track marketing information. The priority of the opportunity that you're in pursuit of, what do you feel your percent chance of winning that project sits at, and you can manage the project as it moves through business development stages, tell Azure what stage you're currently in progress on, and track due dates for those business development stages if you wish. The other important step to take for pursuit projects is linking potential production phases to that business development or marketing phase. At this point in the process, we might want to create a potential budget or estimate for this job that we're in pursuit of. To do that, we'll navigate to the Manage tab. The Manage tab in Azure is where we're going to capture any contractor budget information, where we can start to define our schedule and our resource plan. For many firms this becomes a tool that helps them facilitate their estimating process. We've created a project and we have a simple work breakdown structure defined within the phases of our project. We can start to layer in resource needs. When we talk about a resource in this year end, we refer to labor, so the team that you expect to do the work, expenses that we need to account for, and committed sub consultant costs. So for this example, we have a design phase. We're budgeting for a project manager and a designer. This is all information that I had built into my project template. But if we need to add new phases, if we need to delete a phase, if we need to add new resources to a project, delete a resource, we can make those modifications project to project as needed. A quick step back under project information, when we define the billing type, we could also tell the system what rate table or what rate schedule we want to use for this job. This informs the manage tab what billing rates we should be using to calculate our budget or or our estimate. Depending on your estimating approach, you could start from the bottom and start to estimate hours. If I need or I think I need thirty hours of my PM's time, thirty hours of my designer's time, I plug in my hours. Hours get multiplied by that billing rate, which comes up with a budget for the employee of the resource. Resource budgets roll up to your phase. Phases roll up to the contract, or we could approach this more top down. We might say we have a contract number. The contract might be based on construction cost and a percentage of that construction cost. It might be based on a number that we feel we need to be at to be competitive. It might be based on work that we've done in the past. We have an idea of where we should be in terms of a total contract number, input that contract value, and there's a column for distribution percentage. If we hit this percentage sign, the system will distribute that contract based on a percentage going to each phase and a percentage going to each resource. In this example, we started with a $50,000 contract. 40% of that number went to my design phase. 60% of that number went to my project manager. Take that number divided by their billing rate, and that works backwards to an hour estimate. And this might be a combination of top down and bottom up budgeting. You might start with the top down estimate and then come back and re estimate hours based on what we feel it's really going to take to complete the work. And as you make adjustments to the hours below, that'll recalculate the contract amount. Resources can be generic. If we're putting together an estimate for a job that we're in pursuit of, we may not know who's going to take on the work just yet. As we have a better feel or understanding of who might take on the work, we can choose to name those resources. And again, aren't just limited to labor resources. We might say that we need to account for budgets for sub consultants that we're working with. We can add additional resource lines. We can identify who that resource is, in this case, who's the sub consultant, and we can build in their cost. Lewis Consultants is gonna bill me $5,000 for the work they do on the design phase. In my rate table, I have a 15% markup for my sub consultant fees. So as your knows, if our cost is $5,000, the contractor billing value is $57.50. Phase two, let's estimate $10,000 and those sub consultant values roll into our contract amount. So, here we have a $72,000 budget, but the system keeps track of how many of those dollars sit within our budget, money that we have to spend versus dollars that we have committed to sub consultants. So this is all information that might be tracked while this project is still in a preliminary state. Those preliminary projects can be tracked and managed using business development focused reporting. From a dashboard we can manage all the projects that we're currently in pursuit of, who the client is for that project, what do we feel our priority is, what stage in the process are we sitting in, what is our percent chance of winning, estimated probability of winning that project, what is the potential contract value, what is the weighted or factored value of that contract based on percent chance of winning. Azure can also produce marketing focused reports, things such as what is our win rate versus our loss rate on jobs that we've pursued, what does our pipeline or sales funnel look like based on opportunities, working through that preliminary pursuit process, What types of contracts do we typically win? If we're losing projects, why do we feel we're losing the projects that we are losing? Good marketing analytics that come as a result of tracking preliminary work in the system. Back to the project command center, we track this project to the point where hopefully we've won the job. We can flip this project from what was a preliminary project to an active project record. Typically, at that point, we might also update information like that project's project number. So assign this an active project number. And within business development, there might be additional marketing information that we would like to update. We might update our percent chance of winning within stages. We might identify that we've completed a stage, and then for this final disposition we can indicate that we've won the project. When did we win the project? And maybe why did we win that project? This project that was preliminary is now an active project within Azure. At this point, we might start to develop our project plan further. We've already named our resources, but this might be the point that we start to identify who are the individuals that we expect to take on the work. We might also start to define details such as the project schedule, what do we feel the estimated start and completion dates are for the phases within this project? We'll enter start and completion dates for the two phases that we have on our simple project example. These estimated dates that we define will drive reporting such as Gantt chart reporting and earn value analysis, but can also be used for the purpose of scheduling resources. So let's save our project, close the project command center, and we'll open up the schedule manager. The schedule manager in Ashera has two primary purposes. One focused on project scheduling, which lends itself to employee resource management. Under the project tab, we'll see a few of all of our current active projects. This might be limited to just the projects or the project manager of. If we scroll down, we'll see our new sample project. We can expand on that project. We'll see that project's work breakdown structure, the phases that we created, the labor resources that we budgeted for. From here, we can view that initial budget. We can keep track of the hours that have been actually worked, pulling from time sheets. Budget versus actual tells us what is remaining of our budget. Scheduled will be hours that we planned on the future. Remaining versus schedule tells us what we still have available in our budget for scheduling. To the right of that project summary, we'll see columns that represent upcoming weeks. At this point, we can start to manually plan out when we expect the work to be done per resource, per phase. If you've entered estimated start and completion dates, you can use that data to help you spread that schedule out for that project. Right click on remaining hours, tell the system to automatically spread hours based on phase dates. At this point, the system will spread those hours out based on what was budgeted in the time frame of the phase. And of course, if you need to make adjustments, you can still override and make adjustments as needed. Information that you enter on the project tab informs information on the employee tab. From the employee tab, you'll you'll see a list of employees, and under the employee, all the projects you have that employee scheduled or planned to be working on. So week to week, how many hours do you have that employee planned on each project? That information rolls up to tell you what their weeks are looking like. This can be a good way to get a sense of, do you have employees that are over or underutilized based on the scheduling and planning that you've done to this point? For most firms, this is a good tool to pull open during their weekly scheduling meetings to get a sense of who's over or underutilized and where do we maybe need to make adjustments in project schedules or reassign work to make sure that we're properly utilizing our team. Information captured in the schedule manager can find its way back to dashboard reporting. For a project manager, it might be reporting on or in value metrics information as it relates to their projects as a whole. For employees just using Azure as a timesheet program, they might have access to schedule manager detail as well. A typical dashboard that an individual contributor sees is this my timesheets dashboard, and that can show an employee the last several timesheets they've been put into the system. You might choose to show them things like what is your individual month to date or year to date utilization. You can show them what their planned or scheduled to be working on for the next several weeks. And you could show them every project that they have an assignment on. What projects are you budgeted on? What phases within that project? What is your budget? What have you worked? What do you have left? Tools to really promote self management for an employee. While we're here, let's enter some time to our project. We'll create a new time sheet. When you create a new time sheet, you have options to copy from a prior week's time sheet, which will pull in assignments that you've selected on a prior time sheet. Just remove the hours and the notes. You could choose to copy in from that schedule, and it'll pull everything that you're scheduled to be working on for the week. You can include recent projects, which would be anything that you've worked on in the last two weeks. For this example, let's copy from our prior week's time sheet, which will pull in those projects that we've entered time against the prior week. But we've also created our new project, so we're going to search for that new job. Any part of the project's name or project number will work here in finding a project. The system does a best fit search. You can select the project that you wish to enter time against, pick the project, pick the phase that you worked on, choose the activity, what was the type of work that you did, enter the hours that you've worked. If you had a note that you wanted to capture along with the hours, there's a place to capture that note. You can require the notes to be entered as well if you wish. Say done, and we've captured time against our project. You can save that time sheet periodically through the week, and you can submit that time sheet for approval when you're ready. Another option for time entry is to utilize the mobile app. An employee can log in from their smartphone, username and password, they'll see the days of the week along the top. They can pick the day. Say I wanna add some time, and it's really the same steps that we just went through. Search for your project, pick your project, your phase, activity, what type of work did you do, the hours that you worked, notes if you wish to capture notes, say okay, that'll capture that time. From the mobile app, you can also add from recent entries. If we worked on the same project we did earlier in the week or the week prior, come back, select the same project phase activity, new hours, Just saves you a few clicks. When you're done, say save. As you enter time, in either the mobile app or the standard browser version of the time sheet, All that information is going to find its way back into project reporting. This is a project report view that we call the project scorecard. For project manager, this will show that PM all the projects that are active that they're currently the project manager of. You notice the empty reports to the right. There's a child parent relationship between these reports. If I click on the project line, I'll see information populate for that project. For our new sample project, we see the project snapshot, which gives us a view into that project's contract. We can see the work in progress as well as build values. We can see the cost versus the profit on this project, and we can see what we've spent or what we've burned project to date. And if we look at a project that's a bit further along, we can start to manage the progress of projects as well. This project progress report acts as an earned value analysis. When we create our projects, we define start and completion dates based on start and completion dates and contract values. The system is able to produce this contract line, which acts as our baseline for our project. From this dashboard, we can enter reported percent complete values to track percent complete or earned value of a project. That information can be charted, so we can keep track of what do we feel we've earned versus where we thought we should be when we laid out our baseline. And we're also keeping track of spent, which acts as that burn value. So what have we earned versus what we've burned versus where we thought we should be when we laid out that baseline. Project manager can analyze information at this top project level. They also have the ability to click on a project, drill into a project page, which has a whole subset of detailed project reporting related to the one specific project. So Azure builds project reporting in real time. The system also does is starts to produce a draft invoice for any project that we have in the system that's currently active. I'm gonna refresh our project manager dashboard, and we'll see a widget we call client invoice review. For a project manager, this is a report that can show them each one of the draft invoices associated with their active project work and what billing review stage that draft invoice is currently sitting in. Draft invoices automatically start in a pre review stage. Billing administrators can move an invoice into a project manager review. Project managers can move those into a stage that you define as a firm, which might include things like a principal review, a billing manager review, or marking an invoice ready to bill. From this widget, can see that we have a draft invoice. If it was in a project manager review, we might see the due date when we are expected to get that billing review marked up and sent back to the biller. Can see if a project has work in progress on it, and we could choose to pull a preview of that draft invoice. And that'll pull up a copy of the current draft invoice, so a project manager can start to review what the client's gonna see when we finalize this invoice and send it out to them. Based on our invoice format, we've chosen to show a budget summary. In this case, a project with two phases and a budget amount. First invoice, so zeros in terms of prior build. We're gonna show remaining amount, current and total build amounts. Below the summary, we start to show the hour detail. I've chosen to show the employee's name and subtotal the hours that were worked, the employee's billing rate, and the billing amount. Invoice formats can be configured by your firm to meet your and your client's billing needs. From this preview, we can choose to show the billing review history. This gives us a place to capture notes related to the billing review process and workflow. It can also be used to track notes as this invoice potentially moves through the collections process. Typically, a billing administrator would submit an invoice to a project manager for review. So we would see that as a step one. In our case, we're skipping that step, and as a PM, we're going to indicate to our project or to our biller that this invoice is ready to bill. So we have a place to leave our billing review notes, and we can move this into the next appropriate stage, which in my case is ready to bill. Save our note. If we close our preview, refresh our dashboard, we can see that we've moved our new sample project into that ready to bill stage. Our administrator would take the final step of issuing the invoice to the client. Of course, you can receive that client payment when they do make that payment. So that's maybe the simplified version, but that's what it's going to look like to manage the project lifecycle within Azure from creation of a preliminary project, building an estimate or a budget, converting that to a resource plan and resource schedule, tracking time and managing against that project's budget and schedule, and ultimately building, reviewing, and issuing an invoice to a client. Thank you so much, Ron, for that presentation on Managing Your Entire Project Life Cycle with Deltek Ahira. We have reached our time limit for today, so we will not get to your questions. However, we will make sure to follow-up with all of your questions individually offline, so please feel free to put those into the Q and A box now, or if you put any of them into the Q and A box earlier during this presentation, like I said, we will follow-up with you individually offline. Thank you again for joining us for this presentation, and look out for additional sessions and webinars coming in the future. Thank you again.