With the pressures facing market research organizations, all projects must be as profitable as possible. But as many market research organizations deliver work, project management gaps can slowly eat into profits. (One curious company found and fixed enough gaps to increase profits 130 percent!) Is harnessing your big data a path to profitability?

This article is the second in a three-part series in which author Drew West, director, product marketing at Deltek, a Herndon, Va., provider of enterprise software and information solutions, draws from his experience helping research organizations such as Millward Brown and Chadwick Martin Bailey to explain how a research firm’s own internal “big data” can help it (1) accurately plan projects, (2) efficiently deliver the work and (3) effectively evaluate results. —Joseph Rydholm, Quirk’s editor

Our first installment addressed accurate planning, through better use of your organization’s very own big data. But even the most accurate plans face change – like increased scope, unexpected expense or shifting resources. So moving on from planning, we can use that same internal big data to deliver work – efficiently and profitably.

Data is big if its volume makes it challenging to aggregate and analyze. When it comes to project delivery, many market research organizations face big-data issues across internal systems. Project visibility in most organizations is usually fractured: proposals in one place, projects in another, resource plans in spreadsheets and financial results locked in the back-office. These unnatural project life cycle boundaries are what limit visibility, making work inefficient and unprofitable.

Such poor visibility makes managing change far more difficult. First, project managers fail to recognize the negative impact until it’s too late for corrective action. Second, they unknowingly make poor management decisions. For market research organizations of all types and sizes, disconnected big data is typically:

  • Inaccurate. Organizations simply can’t see – or can’t trust – their resource plans, current work, estimated time to complete or their expected results. Duplicate information spread across systems (like tasks in both a proposal and also a project plan) is redundant and not trustworthy. Worse, information like worked hours is inputted long after the fact (if at all) and often not posted correctly to the client/task.

    Risk: How could a project manager know that a research project is taking longer than expected or that scope has exceeded budget?
  • Invisible. Work-in-process status changes constantly as projects progress, yet gaps between project data and financial systems mean the anticipated results aren’t immediately updated. Often budget metrics like expected margin or staff utilization are hidden from project managers, and critical milestones, like billing events, pass unnoticed.

    Risk: Is the project manager unknowingly bringing profitability into the red by adding a freelance resource? Is the freelancer even needed – or are available internal resources hidden elsewhere in the organization?
  • Inefficient. Clients hire you for research, not clerical work – so administrative time creates cost but not revenue. Yet unreliable information and unclear status mean unnecessary meetings, cumbersome e-mail or time-consuming phone calls to make seemingly simple decisions.

    Risk: How long does it take to determine if a resource is available? To know if a project phase is ready to bill – and for what amount?

Wouldn’t organization-wide visibility lead to better decisions, less administrative expense and more profitable projects? Your project managers need better ways to aggregate information, analyze it and make the best decisions.

Aggregate – bring it together. Good management decisions are based on likely outcomes but cause-effect relationships are unexposed in many research organizations because underlying data is in so many different places. So first on the path to profitable projects? A single, shared organization-wide view of all projects, which must be:

  • Top-to-bottom. From senior leaders to managers and even individual resources, bring appropriate access to project status – so each has an accurate view of completed work and remaining effort.
  • Granular. Projects are groups of tasks; all related and each impacting progress or profit. Establish granular, task-level visibility – expandable into details or collapsible into summaries.
  • Prompt and current. Prompted notifications make information current. Eliminate delays by using workflows to enforce immediate input of crucial worked hours, so information is current and trusted.

Analyze – know what’s happening. People at all levels of your firm will act decisively when they know what’s expected – and can see how their anticipated results compare.

  • Expectations. Perhaps you have organization-wide utilization goals, yet profitability targets vary by geography or service line. Arbitrary goals motivate no one, so have flexibility to set these appropriately – with easily visible targets that expose clear expectations for projects and individuals.
  • Outcomes. Employees need to see their actual performance versus their goals. Constantly calculate and immediately publish current performance against targets – like utilization or billability – even for active work-in-process.
  • Exceptions. Avoid the need for constant monitoring. Enable alerts against unacceptable thresholds – like a text advising the project manager that a project has dropped below acceptable profitability.

Decide – quickly and confidently. Once you’ve brought together the right project visibility for all of your firm’s work and can see where action is needed, managers at all levels can quickly make the best decisions.

  • Access. Information is useful only if people can access it. First, ensure consistency – perhaps with a single, unified approach across the entire firm. Next, publish in various forms, like e-mailing reports or pushing text alerts. Finally, provide easy, on-demand monitoring: dashboards are great but make these available on both desktops and mobile devices, with links to deeper details.
  • Guidance. When possible, provide options that guide decision makers to the best choices (like internal resource versus freelancer or when to bill) which of course require various forms of automated decision-support processes among your aggregated project data.

Moving ahead – look inside. Is your firm gaining a delivery advantage from its own internal big data? Consider past research projects that didn’t have the profit you expected. In hindsight, can you identify some ways better project management might have helped avoid the issues that dragged down profit? If barriers among your internal big data don’t establish the views project managers need to identify potential profit issues – and keep small problems from becoming big issues – look for ways to pull the right project views together.

In part three we’ll address ways to use internal big data to help you evaluate your firm’s performance across the entire organization.

Drew West is director, product marketing in Deltek’s Woburn, Mass., office. He can be reached at 617-528-2331 or at andrewwest@deltek.com. For more information visit www.deltek.com.