Name: Unlocking Project Performance ROI: Analyse & Improve
Uploaded: 2026-08-27T13:00:40.788Z
Duration: 10 min 40 s
Description: Unlocking Project Performance ROI: Analyse & Improve

Transcript for "Unlocking Project Performance ROI: Analyse & Improve": Welcome back. This is the last episode in the series, the season finale, you might say. I'm Richard McCulloch, a solution engineer at Deltek. As always, housekeeping first. So audio is through your computer. There is no dial in for this webinar, so please turn your volumes up. Recordings are available afterwards, and please pop any questions in the q and a, and I'll either answer them in today's session live or I will answer them afterwards. Okay, so Sir David Brailsford made the idea of marginal games famous in British cycling. Fascinating story, if you don't know it I encourage you to read about it, but put simply it's about breaking performance down into small parts and improving each small part by a very small amount. And then you put them all back together again, you end up with something significant. So marginal gains are a useful way for to find opportunities across the business. But when you build a business case, you need to narrow the list down to a few you're prepared to stand behind. Why does it matter, though? Because, it is tempting to add every possible benefit up, you know, win rate utilization, margin reporting, cash flow, AI. The total ROI often becomes enormous in my experience. And it's better to get, and I think almost the bigger it becomes, the, the weaker the business case becomes. People start to look into it deeper, you know, the double counting, the value may not be reach the bottom line, gains that people actually haven't committed to deliver. So today, I wanna keep it simple and talk about what is the smallest set of improvements that gets us over the line. So across the series, we've looked at win rate, utilization, project margin, but those numbers don't move independently. What happens at one stage often affects the decisions at the next stage. So let's see what this means by following one project at Rocksteady, which is the same 90 person firm we've been using through the through this series. At Wynn, the team prices the work without a clear view on how similar projects performed or who is likely to be available when it begins. Then the start date moves. A specialist is about to become available elsewhere in the business, but the planning team can't see it. So they approve a six week external or third party cover, which might be, you know, £15,000 like we had in episode two, I think it was. And during delivery, the client changes the design. The team absorbs the additional work, but the change never reaches the forecast or the fee. None of those decisions look unreasonable on their own. Each team acted on the information it had at the time, only later defined finance joining the dots, the bid assumptions, the unnecessarily third party external cover, and the unrecovered charge. The problem wasn't people making the decision, it was what they had in front of them at the time when they made the decision. This project shows us where value can be lost, but finding an opportunity doesn't automatically make that part of the business case. So let's go back to the three numbers from the series and ask which we can sensibly include. So let's pull those numbers up kind of side by side on the screen here, from from our previous episodes. So we've got 36,000 in gross profit. We've got £117,000 in fee capacity, which still needs a route to money, and some £10,000 in margin retained. Add them together and you've got roughly £230,000 thousand of opportunity, but it is not 230,000 of guaranteed profit. Some already has a route to the bottom line, some need converting, and some can easily be counted twice. The The 230,000 tells us that there is something worth looking at. It doesn't tell us how much of it to put in front of the board. So rather than start with the biggest possible benefit, let's start with the costs we need to cover. So most business cases start by asking how much value could this create. Let's ask a different question. That's how much improvement do we need to make to cover, the costs. So I've picked a 100,000 because it's a round number and it's easy for maths and easy to follow. For your own case, you would swap that for the annual cost of change that you're considering. And every firm will come at this from a different, you know, start point. You know, some of you are gonna view your strongest opportunities in margin and utilization. Some of you may say it's win rate or cash flow or something else entirely. Right? There's many, many other levers a business case can be based on. You'll also have your own view on what's realistically achievable, and and we've and benchmarking data is good to help you with that, and we talked about some of the examples in in previous episodes. So these these numbers won't be necessarily be right for everyone, but they're they're they're a starting point. Right? And and and the point in this method I'm saying is basically let's start with the hurdle. So it's use use the benefits you believe in and see how little of them need to change to hit that hurdle. So what would Rocksteady need to do to to clear the 3 figure 100,000? So they would need half a percentage point of project margin. They would need half a percentage point of win rate, and if they avoided three third party or external assignments, that locked together would be just over the 100,000 a year. So this is kind of the, you know, the breakeven line, effectively, in a way. Right? Not not necessarily the finished case for the for the board for the board approval, because there's lots of other things to consider. Right? What what when do the benefits arrive in the business? What are the risks? Are there what does future cash flow look like? And and also we haven't added things like admin savings, faster cash collection, or AI productivity. There are plenty of other levers in in in the ROR the ROI model we we've created that we we could discuss with you. This is just some examples from our rock study, example, firm. So, instead of asking, will this transform everything? We can now ask, do we believe these three changes are achievable? And that's a question I think a board can answer a lot a lot easier. So the maths is kind of the easy part. Right? You know, half a percent of 7,700,000 is 38,500 and and finance can easily check that sort of stuff in seconds. The question will be more about change in practice. Will a change in scope or forecast trigger a commercial review while there is still time to protect the fee? Would evidence from similar projects change whether bid, whether whether you bid, how we price, and whether we walk away or not? And will somebody check capacity across the whole firm before approving external cover? If the answer to those is no, then maybe they shouldn't be in the business case. And this is why I think every business case, or every benefit, sorry, needs a named owner. And and I don't mean a person responsible for the system. I mean a person responsible for changing the decision and delivering the results. For Roxetti, those three figures only stay if the three people agree to work differently. And the technology question is is quite simple then. It's can the system get the right evidence to the people or the group of people before they have to make that decision? So let's go back to rock study. What information could have changed those three decisions? At the bid stage, the team needed client history, evidence from similar projects, and a view of likely capacity. Before approving third party or external cover, they needed one firm wide view of pipeline, you know, start date, skills, and availability. And when the scope changed, they needed to see the, effect on effort, margin, and fee while there was still time to recover and reprice. Rocksteady already has most of this information. It's just spread across different places, so it often arrives after the decision. A connected ERP brings it together and puts it in front of the person or persons to make the decision while they can still act on it. And it also gives AI useful context. AI might flag that the scope has changed while the fee has not, or the capacity is about to become available elsewhere in the firm. It doesn't make the decision. It draws attention to something worth checking. You're still deciding what what to do. And lastly, you know, thank you for sticking with me through this series. I hope it's given you a practical way to build a business case that finance can believe, picking a few benefits you are willing to put your name to rather than assume everything will improve. And I encourage you to to to look at the decisions people are making in your own business. What are what are they working with? Well, sorry, where are they working with any part information? Where would seeing more a little earlier make a difference to the bottom line? I mentioned throughout the series we're running these forty five minutes ROI working sessions to help you explore some of these questions. You bring your numbers, we can put them in our calculator and benchmark you against industry data and and leave you with a business case. You can you can take that to your business and your board. If you'd like to work with us, you'll see a poll on the screen. You can select kind of accept, I think it is or not, yes, and the team will arrange contact you and arrange a session. And to close this out, you know, the point of this series is simple. You don't need to claim that everything will improve. A few improvements will be enough as long as you can explain the value, say what has to change, and name the person who's gonna be responsible for it. Thanks again for joining me. I hope we've given you something useful to say back to your business. Thanks.