In our previous posts about project management analytics, we looked at how Mark, a fashion entrepreneur, could use Zoho Analytics for project overview and task analytics.
Now it’s time to look at how service businesses which use a project management software like Zoho Projects can utilize Zoho Analytics to gain insights for monitoring the overall project ROI and performance.
Consider Sophia, who runs an IT consultancy where the motto is “time is money.” Let us discuss a few key reports that will benefit someone in her position.
Billable hours analysis
For Sophia’s business, billable hours are directly related to a project’s profitability that can thereby impact the company’s bottom line. Hence her twin objectives would be to minimise non-billable activities and maximise billed hours for her client work.
The following reports show the spread of billable vs non-billable hours, and the overall billability percentage across projects. This helps Sophia to identify the projects with more non-billable hours, and see if there’s a possibility of reining them in.
She can further view the billable – non billable hours stacked by individual resources. This can help her in optimizing the billable hours at the resource level.
She can also view the overall billability trend by hours and percentage over any given time period. In the below case, the last 12 months.
Now Sophia can compare the total hours billed every month against a minimum threshold required for the company’s smooth sailing. This helps her to identify months where the billable hours have fared below expectations.
She can also look into ‘the average billable hours per day’ and ‘the average billable hours by members’ for each project over its lifetime.
How significant are these reports for Sophia’s business? They can help her in better understanding of the fluctuations in overall billable hours, especially during months of steep rise or downfall.
Billable Revenue Analysis
We had discussed earlier that “time is money” for Sophia’s business. But she can realize the money in hand only if the revenue gets accrued from the clients for the hours billed. The total amount billed by different projects over the past few months, can be seen by her as shown below.
She can also dive further into the revenue accrued by individual members under each project.
She can also holistically see the revenue per individual for the entire resource set.
The average billable amount by month by project is a measure of revenue potential. Sophia can maximise her total billable revenue when she optimizes the billable hours of each project according to its revenue potential.
Using both the billable revenue and billable hours analysis, she can identify both the high and low performing projects and individual resources, that could definitely help her on the future course of action.
ROI Analysis: Planning vs Actualization
For all the plans Sophia makes to improve billable hours and revenue, its ROI (or) effectiveness can only be seen from the actual results. Any further improvement or corrective action cannot happen without analyzing the planned vs actual comparison.
The following ‘Planned vs Actual’ report series shows the results in terms of billed hours and revenue along with the percentage of actualization for both, over the last 12 months.
Sophia can see the same comparisons by months or individual resources as shown below:
She can also see the hours and revenue actualization trend over the past few months.
Sophia can also look into the resource utilization (i.e) actual vs planned billed hours logged in by the workforce.
She can also see the utilization trend as shown below. Both these reports help her in identifying and course-correcting discrepancies if any in terms of resource allocation and utilization.
Conclusion
While these are just a few examples, Zoho Analytics offers many more predefined reports for project management and performance. In addition to this, custom reports can be created for specific requirements.
We have seen how Zoho Analytics is useful for Sophia to monitor overall project performance by billable hours and revenue accrued, and identify the scope and opportunities for improvement in terms of ROI.
Like Sophia, if you are in the services or consulting business, where projects have become increasingly agile, insights offered by Zoho Analytics can rightly serve you towards achieving your core business objectives. Set up project management analytics over Zoho Projects for free. We also offer project management analytics for Teamwork Projects.
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