Working efficiently: 7 reasons why your project staff are losing time

Your administration runs smoothly, payroll processes itself and a leave request is sorted with two clicks. The back office of your firm is in good order. Now look at the people who earn the money: your project managers, consultants and engineers. Those people are scarce: according to the UWV, engineers are among the professions where the shortage will keep growing until 2030. They work with Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, a planning tool, WeTransfer, Excel and self-built tools, for example to link map coordinates to documents. Every one of them is a fine program, but none of those programs supports the project as a whole.

The consequences never show up all at once, which is why they go unnoticed for so long. They hide in the five minutes here and the quarter of an hour there, in the project manager who updates lists on a Friday afternoon and in the invoice that goes out weeks later than it could have.

Fuse Solutions started inside an engineering firm and now works for more than 40 firms. In this article you will read the seven reasons why your staff are losing time, how to recognise them and what you need to work efficiently.

1. Separate tools get in the way of working efficiently

An average project quickly touches six or seven programs:

• Teams for discussions with colleagues
• SharePoint for documents
• Outlook for correspondence with the client
• a separate planning tool
• WeTransfer for sharing large files
• the accounting package, where hours and invoicing end up
• Excel for everything that doesn't fit anywhere else

Each program does its own job well. The problem lies in the space between them. Research by Harvard Business Review shows that employees switch between applications about 1,200 times a day. That costs almost four hours a week, roughly 9 percent of their working time.

On top of that, anyone who wants to know how a project is doing has to gather the information themselves. That takes time and produces a picture that is already half outdated by the moment you ask for it.

What you can do about it: map out which information belongs to a project and where it currently lives. Then appoint one central place for project information and make sure the other tools connect to it, so that they support the project instead of sitting next to it.

2. Self-built tools make you vulnerable

Many firms absorb that fragmentation with their own little tools. We recently spoke to an engineering firm with a few hundred employees that had done exactly that:

• its own tool for email registration
• a tool that created project numbers and SharePoint folders
• separate tools for planning and for workflows

That worked, until the employee who had built the email registration left. That left a tool that nobody could maintain any more and that had never been linked to the client database anyway.

Building it yourself is an understandable choice. You know your own processes best and a first version is up quickly. The bill comes later: maintenance, updates, integrations that are never finished, knowledge that sits in one person's head, and data security. Who installs the security updates, who has access to which data and where is that data actually stored? With a tool built by a single colleague, often nobody knows the answer.

The NCSC (the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre) lists the basic principles for digital security. A self-built tool has to meet them just as much as the rest of your software.

What you can do about it: ask three questions about every in-house tool:

• Who will maintain this if the builder leaves?
• Which systems is it connected to, and which integrations are still missing?
• Is software development part of the core of our firm, or are we solving something for which a solution already exists?

3. Tracking projects in your accounting software mainly serves the administration

An accounting package is strong in finance and time registration. Many firms therefore configure a solution of their own on top of it to track projects, with budgets and invoicing. For the financial side of a project that works well. The project manager who has to plan a study, collect data on site and deliver a report finds less support there for their daily work.

In practice, project staff then use the accounting software only for what they have to, such as booking hours. The rest of the work moves to Excel, SharePoint and the mailbox.

What you can do about it: let the accounting package do what it is good at: the accounting of your organisation. For carrying out projects, choose an environment that was built for it and that is linked to your accounting package.

Your project staff notice that difference immediately. Software made for project work fits the way they work: planning, project file and hours in one place, in the office and on site. They no longer have to adapt to a system set up for the administration. Meanwhile, the administration simply gets what it needs, because hours and invoice data flow through to the accounting automatically.

4. Tedious manual work keeps staff from working efficiently

Ask a project employee where their day goes and you will hear things like:

• dragging emails one by one to a central project folder
• manually creating a working folder for every new project
• filling in forms and retyping data, with typing errors as a result
• working with loose documents instead of from one project file
• keeping track in Excel of what a good dashboard would show you immediately

Each action takes a few minutes. Work it out: if twenty project employees lose a quarter of an hour a day on this kind of work, that is more than 1,000 hours a year. On top of that, it drains energy. Highly educated engineers and consultants are not happy about creating folders and dragging emails.

What you can do about it: have a few employees keep track for a week of which actions they keep repeating. Everything that is predictable, such as creating a project folder, linking an email to a project or passing data on to a report, can be automated, and good project software automates a lot more.

5. Staff lack insight into their hours against the budget

A consultant books their hours neatly, but does not see how they relate to the hours budget of the project or the phase they are working in. Only at the final cost calculation does it turn out that the budget has been well exceeded. At that point all you can do is establish what went wrong; adjusting course is no longer possible.

Staff are perfectly willing to stay within budget. They just don't have the information to do so.

What you can do about it: make hours spent against the budget visible to the people who book the hours, per project and per phase, at the moment they book. Then an employee sees for themselves when things get tight and can raise the alarm in time.

6. Project managers lack insight into the progress of their projects

Project managers often have no up-to-date picture of the progress of their own project. Management and administration do ask for that picture, so the project manager keeps a list with the status, the hours and what can be invoiced. That takes time, and in busy weeks it gets neglected.

As a result, the insight is also missing further along in the organisation:

• management steers on figures that are weeks old
• the administration doesn't know what can be invoiced
• planning doesn't know who has room for new work

What you can do about it: make progress a by-product of the work itself. If hours, milestones and deliveries are recorded where the work happens, everyone sees the status without anyone having to update a list.

7. Invoices go out too late

If nobody knows exactly which work is finished, the invoice goes out later than necessary. That costs you in three ways:

• Money. It stays with the client longer, which puts pressure on your working capital.
• Energy. The project manager has to work out afterwards what can be invoiced.
• Reputation. A client who receives an invoice months after delivery is not pleased about it.

What you can do about it: link invoicing to progress. When a phase is completed or a milestone is reached, that must be immediately visible to whoever invoices, without the project manager having to remember it.

Working efficiently starts with good tools and insight

You automated your administration and HR because you know what that delivers. For your project staff, that step has often not yet been taken, even though they are the ones who earn the money.

The seven problems in this article have one common cause: no single system supports the project as a whole. You see it in fragmented information, vulnerable in-house tools, manual work, a lack of insight into hours and progress, and invoices that are sent too late.

That is what Fuse was made for. Fuse started inside an engineering firm and supports the entire project:

• Fuse Project guides your project from opportunity to invoice, including planning, hours, documents, dashboards and smart integrations.
• Fuse Collect automates inspections and data collection on site, with reports straight from the field.
• Integrations with, among others, Outlook and your accounting package make sure your existing systems simply keep working.
• Standard set-up for firms, which can be supplemented with customisation for your work processes where needed.

Would you like to read more first? Take a look at all Fuse features.

Would you like to know what this delivers for your firm? Schedule a conversation and we will look together at where time and energy are leaking away at your firm.