Mavenlink eBook 5 Trends 2015-08

8/16/2019 Mavenlink eBook 5 Trends 2015-08

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01. Introduction

03. The Project is a Living Plan

05. The Project is Your Proposal

07. The Project is a Workspace

09. The Project is Your Network

12. The Project is a Profit & Loss

15. About the Author

Table of Contents


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If you deliver a professional service, the

world in which you conduct business is

undergoing rapid transformation. The

pressures are more intense, your margins

are being squeezed, and it’s very difficult

to win and keep business.

Today’s competitive, global environment is

dictating a new norm. The world has

flattened and alternative, less costly

geographies for producing goods and

delivering services have become more

accessible. Organizations are reducing

full-time employee headcount, and

increasing their reliance on outside

contractors and outsourced vendors todeliver work. In the average business

today, more than 30% of the workforce is

outside of the company, and that is

expected to reach 40% by 2020.

Project work is fast becoming the way of

business. While this means there is

greater demand for your firm’s services,

there has also been an explosion of

competitors as the workforce has begun a

multi-year shift to external provider

ecosystems.

Eamonn Kelly, the Chief Marketing Officer

at Deloitte, captured the shift well in a

recent report Business Ecosystems Come of

Age: “Ecosystems today are doing nothing

less than redefining the shape and

structure of the economy. They are

increasingly determining business success

and business failure. They are enabling

massive and rapid innovation around the

world. They are playing a very, very

critical role in shaping the future of our

society.”

Source: Deloitte University Press, April 15, 2015, http://dupress.com/articles/business-ecosystems-come-of-age-business-trends/ Interview via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbNx2ltM7yE

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To win, a new mindset and a new approach

are required. You need to rethink your

business from the ground up. Your success

depends on your ability to deliver

predictability and profitability, with

visibility, control and confidence.

To help facilitate this transition, project

management technology is evolving

rapidly and “the project” is becoming a

dynamic platform to run professional

services organizations of the future.

Whether you are a consulting firm, IT

services organization, marketing

agency, property management firm, or

other professional service, you will

want to understand these five trends

that can help make your business

infinitely scalable. Grasping theseconcepts will help you to adapt to

changing business conditions and help

propel your business for years to come.

VIRTUAL TEAMS

You need to deploy and activate large groups of people from both inside and outside

the organization, that you neither own nor control.

VIRTUAL OFFICES

Work must be delivered in open and collaborative environments, and you need to

facilitate much more complex coordination of expertise and activities from across

the globe.

TRANSPARENCY & VISIBILITY

Clients are infinitely more sophisticated at managing outside providers and

have increased expectations around how you work, and how much you

charge. This puts pressure on your margins.

Working in these new ecosystems is complex, and has introduced a new reality for you:


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3.

Planning, of course, is where the project

begins. In the past, the process involved a

project manager utilizing templates or

software to create a project plan, and then

disseminating it to the team for execution.

Done and shared, we were on our way.

The plan can no longer be a static thing.

It’s alive and constantly being reshaped in

reaction to variables that change

throughout the life of the project. The

speed and compressed nature of business

today requires a fluidity of structure that

allows a plan to evolve on a daily basis if

need-be. Project teams must work through

the barrage of new incoming information

and unexpected turns on a continual basis.

Project stakeholders need to be able to

view the current status of the project plan

and update tasks and timelines in real

time.


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What needs to be done

Who needs to do it

With what help and review

By when

With what budget

Under what constraints and dependencies

Agility and speed are required to execute projects in

today’s fast paced business environment, and each

of these rely on project clarity to happen – clarity

around things like:

With project clarity, every stakeholder in the plan feels more agile, better aligned with the team

and more accountable, regardless of how the plan evolves. The point here is the project is now a

plan – one that is alive in a way that is shareable, distributed, assigned, owned, understood, and

accessible across your entire network of stakeholders.


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Despite technological advances in

professional services bid and project

management software, the synergy between

a company’s sales organization and its

delivery organization is often still broken.

Why? Sales process is handled in one system,

proposals in another, and the project in yetanother.

The resulting challenges usually come in the

form of misalignment between the sales

proposal and the execution plan, duplicate

work going from system to system as the

proposal is completed, and duplicate work as

adjustments are made to the proposal and

project once the client provides feedback. If

misalignment persists through project start,

another negative outcome is less than desired

margins. Most professional services

businesses need to relook at their proposal

management processes to try and eliminate

these issues, keeping a universal focus on

satisfying the needs of their client while

meeting profitability targets, one project at

time.

Project technology is evolving to support

these needs and help professional

organizations turn projects into proposals.

Instead of jumping from system to system,

the project plan can serve as a proposal, and

adjustments to the proposal are made within

the plan — they’re one and the same. Your

global, extended workforce and their

associated rates and availability, are all

available within your project management

application, which means fewer steps to

build proposals and deliver engagements

with confidence. Once you get the buyer to

“yes” and they are ready to begin the project,

you will be able to hit the start button

immediately because the proposal is built

from the project plan and the plan has

already been built.

THE PROJECT IS

YOUR PROPOSAL

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Plan and execute in an efficient manner

More predictably meet your margins

Manage customer expectations

Fulfill those expectations

Provide transparency

And manage change throughoutthe customer lifecycle

By using your project plan as the proposal, they

will mirror each other, and help you better:

The benefits abound from there.


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The concept of an online venue in which to

meet for work purposes is a relatively

recent trend, yet it’s one that is

accelerating at lightning speed. As a

professional, you probably expect there to

be an online destination where you can at

least go to share files or collaborate withothers. Expectations are growing quickly,

technology is evolving just as fast, and the

workplace is changing in front of your eyes.

The workplace is becoming a virtual

workspace.

Where collaboration used to be facilitated

through blocks of cubicles, conference

rooms, email, and conference calls, younow have a virtual container that houses

the activity, the communication, the

deliverables, the proposals, the finances,

and even the virtual personalities of the

people involved.

These new workspaces mimic the physical

workplace and interactions, and the same

needs for privacy and permissions,

information sharing and visibility, alignment

messaging, and project management still

apply.

A bulk of project management technology

today was originally built for the professional

project manager, and did a poor job of

integrating and accommodating external and

remote constituents who were tasked with

delivering an outcome. Traditionally missing

from consideration has been the commercial

relationship that exists among parties –

providers, your supply chain, and your clientsTechnology is finally taking real-world

requirements for project management and

applying them to the capabilities of an online

workspace. The degree to which you can

mimic these real world scenarios will help

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The concept of an online venuein which to meet for workpurposes is a relatively recent

trend, yet it’s one that isaccelerating at lightning speed

people to embrace the change.

In today’s business world, your clients require

transparency. Clients want to validate the work

that has been done on their behalf for which they

are paying. They want more details. They want to

build a trusted relationship. Your project as a

virtual workspace is the answer to these demands,

and thankfully, it’s now at your disposal and

something that many early adopters are already

deploying as a competitive advantage.


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TechCrunch contributor James Currier has

analyzed the recent 5-year emergence of

market networks, which combine the

transactional nature of a marketplace with

the identity and communication

capabilities of a network.

“You can imagine a market network for

every industry where professionals are not

interchangeable: law, travel, real estate,

media production, architecture,

investment banking, personal finance,

construction, management consulting and

more. Each market network will have

different attributes that make it work in

each vertical, but the principles will

remain the same. Over time, nearly all

independent professionals and their

clients will conduct business through the

market network of their industry. We’re

just seeing the beginning of it now. Market

networks will have a massive positive

impact on how millions of people work andlive, and how hundreds of millions of

people buy better services.”

THE PROJECT IS

YOUR NETWORK

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Internal talent

External service providers

Freelancers

Technology specialists

Clients

This collaborative and transactional socialization of the

workspace will continue to build towards an inherent

network inside your projects. New people from all over

the world will increasingly be brought into your

projects in the form of:

Your project networks will expand into ‘expertise groups’ and evolve into a means to more

dynamically locate and leverage talent. This is increasingly important and necessary because of

the speed at which you are asked to get work done.


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The extent to which you find and source

this talent at speed will be critical to your

project’s success. In order to make the best

choices and the right business decisions to

help you get your work done, you will need

a trusted global network accessible within

and connected to your projects. The

demand for specialized skill sets will only

increase in the coming years, and trusted

providers will have the resources available

to deliver on client needs. Your networks

will be an invaluable, wholly integrated

means of doing business, and trust will beequally important within the network of a

provider as more and more of the team

executing on a given project will be

external, yet need to execute to your

standards, as a representative of your

brand.

Five years from now this is the waybusiness will all be working. Ten years

from now, every company will have a

network of this sort. They will be robust,

proactive and trustworthy. New ways of

identifying the right specialists to meet

your needs will be clear and easy.

Procurement will be as much a part of

these project networks as the people.

Today, more than 30% of the USworkforce is comprised ofindependent service

professionals, totallingapproximately 40 million people

Source: Crunch Network “From Social Networks to Market Networks”, June 27, 2015 by James Currier http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/27/from-social-to-market-networks/

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The best run services companies have

learned to run every project as a Profit

and Loss statement (P&L). Accenture,

one of the most successful and

profitable professional services firms on

the planet, gets this right, and it’s core

to how they operate. Projects arebecoming your day-to-day work, and if

you can manage them as a P&L with a

specific margin target, you will have the

real-time ability to predict outcomes

and respond to changing business

dynamics.

Technology is evolving to support this

approach, eliminating the need for the

overwhelming number of

spreadsheets and disparate systems

required to track project activity and

manage your business. The days are

gone when you need to wait weeks oreven months for your accounting team

to communicate project margins and

results.

THE PROJECT IS

A PROFIT & LOSS


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TechnologyConnecting the Dots.

Today’s technology delivers in a single application the tight coupling of all the necessary busines

components required to manage every dimension of project delivery in real-time, with a

contextualized experience for all participants:

Task and Timelines

Resource Availability and Utilization

Time and Expense

Budget and Margin Control

Project-Level Accounting

Figure 01.1

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In today’s high-performing companies, project

managers are also profit managers. To effectively

deliver the results expected, you must have the

visibility and the tools at your disposal to know

what your margins are and the ability to predict

financial performance of every project.

By leveraging the concept of distributedaccountability, you can confidentially

scale your business to literally any sizeyou want.

Fortunately, it’s possible to manage business

this way today, and for every single project

P&L to roll up into your overall business. By

leveraging the concept of distributed

accountability, you can confidentially scale

your business to literally any size you want.


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Ray Grainger, co-founder and CEO ofMavenlink, is a recognized and

awarded expert in technology and

services delivery. He honed his

expertise as a global managing partner

at Accenture, where he helped

organizations such as Apple, 3M, Sony

and Oracle work smarter and more

profitably. Ray founded Mavenlink to

help professional services companiesgrow by combining technology and

industry best practices.

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Mavenlink eBook 5 Trends 2015-08

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