Improve your project resource management for better profitability

Ensuring the project resource management, from its inception to its delivery, is not without its pitfalls. Planning it well, orchestrating it correctly, ensuring fluid communication with your team and your client, before delivering the project on time cannot be improvised. Equipping yourself with an innovative, efficient and intuitive solution remains the most reliable way to optimize and manage all your projects. Whoz is the unique solution that allows (finally) to cover all the assignment processes of all your experts / talents. In order to understand how it changes the game internally, let’s take stock of its strengths and benefits for agencies.

Agency project resource management: 3 best practices to manage your team

Any action can be optimized, and team management in agencies is no exception. Whether it’s through practices dating back to the 1990s, such as the agile method, or even through connected platforms from 2010, optimizing the planning of your projects contributes to improving collaboration between your employees. Take a closer look at all these practices to implement the best management strategy for your project teams!

Agility: streamline the collaboration of your team for your agency projects

We hear a lot about the agile method, so it is certainly not unknown to you. Although it is practiced by more and more companies, especially those developing software, its power is still underestimated for agency projects, whether they are medium or long term. Let’s start at the beginning!

What is the agile method?

The agile method refers to a way of working and designing projects in the form of sprints. These sprints are illustrated by a certain number of tasks, carried out by each member of a team. If their duration is generally between two and six weeks, it is refined on a case by case basis. This method aims to improve communication between collaborators, to make fluid changes on projects, in order to deliver them in the allotted time.

Why use the agile method in an agency?

Working in agile mode has several advantages. The first of them concerns the coordination between the teams. It is important to know that all parties involved in a project must continuously share the progress of the project. Thanks to the agile method, they can more easily readjust certain ideas or modify the deadline for a particular task. This method also allows for better communication with the client, and by extension more transparency regarding the progress of his request. The client has the opportunity to give feedback before the team takes a wrong turn. Prevention is better than cure!

The agile method brings great flexibility to the team. More flexible, it can manage unforeseen events with greater reactivity, as well as improve the stability of a project. However, it is essential that the missions and decisions to be made remain clear to everyone at the end of each sprint.

A connected platform to strengthen ties

Applying the agile method is the first step, but it calls for others. In order for all the members of a project team to work hand in hand in a sustainable way, you must first equip yourself with the right solution. Having the right people with the right skills is no longer enough to deliver your project. It is crucial that all employees adopt the right reflexes and share common values. Opposite habits tend to create a lack of communication and growing frustrations.

To facilitate and fluidify communication and collaboration, simple and effective solutions are possible. These allow each collaborator to see where he/she stands in his/her project, while keeping an overview of the work of his/her colleagues, and having a global vision of the operational and financial performance of the project in progress. This makes it easier to know who to turn to for a particular need, to be aware of whether a task has been completed or is in production, and to anticipate the future workload of the teams. The key to success lies in the sharing of business information and skills/expertise that meet the competitive challenges of organizations: the profitability of project teams.

Towards an intuitive Talent Cloud

Since the Covid-19 global pandemic, companies are facing new work organizations where real-time access to their entire ecosystem of experts (internal and external) is the key to maximizing the management of their project teams.

Today, it is essential to have a 360° vision of all of your talents in order to access their skills, availability and TJM in real time.

Several solutions are dedicated to “talent management” but Whoz goes beyond. In a single platform (#ByeByeExcel) you consolidate a dynamic mapping of all your skills, which is updated in real time. The + :

• No more wasting time crossing information, they will now be reliable and updated!

• No more handwritten CVs for teams and managers after each project!

A Talent Cloud is therefore an innovative solution to engage your teams, guarantee them meaningful missions, while allowing you to cultivate your profitability. Because it is not uncommon to see in agencies, talents frozen on a project in which they can not really accomplish. Such a platform thus aspires to align the experiences of each person with their wishes of evolution and the future missions of the already identified clients (pre-positioning). Whoz is one of these solutions, and even the most powerful one.

To be able to centralize and share data more easily

Drive-type tools are no longer in the news. And yet, many employees still don’t have the reflex to use them, and leave their data in their personal hard drive. Except that a project cannot be fully collaborative if all the data are not present and shared in the same space.

Many Cloud software are available and are intended to promote and simplify the sharing of documents. Centralizing, processing, sorting and distributing in a few clicks allows for more efficient internal communication, and therefore better project management.

We are talking about a solution with a wider spectrum than a simple document sharing tool. Whoz centralizes in a single platform all your data related to your activity: your customer needs, your skills related to your talents, your project planning, your dashboards and your key performance indicators.

An optimized timesheet: the flagship tool for managing and anticipating time spent on projects

A timesheet is an indispensable function to successfully complete your projects. It allows you to manage your deadlines, but also to better face unexpected events.

Have a clear vision on the workload of your teams

Gaining visibility into your team’s work doesn’t have to mean “snooping”. It simply allows you to identify completed tasks, those in progress and those still to be produced. In the blink of an eye, it is possible to determine which profiles are available for a side project, or even to check the time allocated to each task.

Compare planned efforts with actual efforts

A timesheet allows you to see if a project’s time has been correctly estimated to a client. As we know, a project can be late or early for various reasons. The first one is of course a wrongly estimated project time. Furthermore, these reasons can be internal or external to the agency, the most important being to identify them in order to be able to rectify these errors for the next projects.

Know how to anticipate delays

Moreover, when a delay is identified and notified thanks to a timesheet solution, it is possible to react in a reactive way. The timesheet aims to find the employee who is available to work on a certain task, and thus to deliver the service to the customer on time. However, if you find that the delay is irrecoverable, it is advisable to notify the customer as soon as possible.

Enable better concentration and productivity

It’s human, as soon as the deadline of a project approaches, the reflex is often to do everything to ensure that the mission is accomplished on time. If this is not the case, one must question one’s motivation…

The timesheet allows employees to maintain their motivation, so that everyone can progress at the same pace. The ultimate goal is to conclude the project in a harmonious way.

A complete dashboard to improve the profitability of your projects

The profitability of an agency project comes from a study of your key indicators and KPIs, in order to clearly define the benefits you have derived from these projects. This profitability comes from the skills of each of your collaborators, in order to respond effectively to your clients’ needs.

Monitor your financial KPIs and adapt your strategy

A complete solution for managing your projects is a solution that automatically calculates your financial indicators. Turnover, commercial and global margin, ROI of your team or even their average cost per day, all the important figures must be seen and integrated at a glance to always adjust your resources.

Depending on the analysis made, the idea is to be able to increase the price of your services, to assign more employees to a project, or simply to remotivate the team. In any case, it is fundamental to measure the KPIs of your agency projects to make the best decisions.

Identify skills needs to better recruit tomorrow

The market is in constant evolution, especially in the fields of new technologies, web development, project management and global marketing. In this sense, your customers will have, or even already have, requests with specific needs. A solution such as Whoz allows you to identify the most sought-after skills on the market and those that are missing in your team. Having such a background allows you to remain the most competitive and innovative in your industry!

Covering the whole process of team assignment by centralizing all the customer needs, while taking into consideration the evolution wishes of the teams, is possible through a digital solution. The best one remains the one that allows you to follow in an agile way all your current and future projects, from A to Z. Thanks to Whoz, it is possible to identify in one click the best team to position on each project, to optimize schedules, to anticipate pre-staffing, to refine operational and financial performances in real time. Moreover, such a solution tends to make the best decisions during the project, so that at the end, you can study the KPIs and prepare the success of your agency.