Bottom-line benefits for the company
The overall solution value of a connected organization derived from Project Operations automates the mundane and accentuates the already great components of a robust project management solution. Gone are the days of reminding team members to input their time, manually generating invoices, or physically moving data from one system to another. Back to the house analogy, this is really the smart home version of project management and operations functionality.
As the chief operating officer, practice manager, firm partner, or other vested interest in the success of the firm after implementing Project Operations, you should expect a number of things to benefit the overall firm. First is that you should expect the firm to grow through this experience and be able to move up by one or two levels in your project management maturity. Typically, firms start off at level 1 by performing very entrepreneurially in their style and systems. This is how they succeed! As the firm grows, structure and policy replace ad hoc systems to bring the firm into some compliance. Growing from level 1 through to level 5, where you are able to not just collaborate but really benefit from collaborating across the firm brings value to every aspect of the business. With this, you win more business, more consistently and more profitably.
Gone are the days of having revenue leakage, missing targets, and deadlines, or having low-productivity solutions in place. Leadership, client relations, team members, delivery, and finance and operations are all aligned and working together toward the firm's goals. Furthermore, each of these areas is working together to drive the business strategically.
Bid-to-win ratios improve as core utilization rises and project profitability increases, which flow directly to the bottom-line Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization (EBITDA). The firm is able to deliver on projects with a level of optimization, which makes the firm an attractive place for the best talent, thus producing the further healthy growth of the firm. Utilizing the Project Operations system should provide the firm with bigger, predictably deliverable projects that add to the bottom line.
A solution such as Project Operations should bring value to the topline, operational, utilization, and bottom line with value concentrating in the areas most lacking today in your firm, meaning that if you are struggling today with winning new projects, focusing on the frontend, customer engagement processes will likely result in more business upfront that can be delivered through your delivery teams. Frequently, we see that the focus moves from one end of the project implementation process to another as we grow within the solution. Today, you are fixing sales. Tomorrow, operations… thus you can see the continuous growth opportunities this will uncover for the firm.
The remainder of this book is designed to lay out for you the plan to begin taking advantage of Project Operations in your firm or business. We are going to cover the Microsoft framework in the next chapter and then get into the setup and configuration of the system. This will not replace the technical expertise of certified individuals but will complement strong implementation methodologies in Microsoft Project Operations.