Projects are critical for the way many of our clients manage their most important work for their own clients. Because projects are generally larger, run longer and have a lot more revenue (and cost) tied to them, they need to be managed well, and because they involve working with unpredictable clients who often change their minds, successful project managers need to be agile too.
With this major upgrade, Accelo gives project managers a lot more insight into how their projects are tracking.
The first new feature in this upgrade is the introduction of real-time forecasting of budgets and profitability on projects.
While project managers have long been able to keep track of the value and hours used compared to their project budget, being able to predict how a project is going to work out in the end has required a lot of guessing or mental maths by the project manager - neither of which are a good strategies for busy people with more important things to do.
The new Forecast toggle in the Project Overview makes it easy to see where Accelo thinks the project is going to finish up if the project continues running its course from that point forth. When tasks and milestones go over budget, we're able to forecast the project as going over budget in the end - and if tasks and milestones are completed under budget, we can take that into account with our forecast, too, including in terms of project profitability (see below).
Possibly the most impressive feature in a world where different staffs have different costs and may even have different chargeable rates on a project is the ability to harmonize all this information into a forecast for project profitability and profit margin.
Need to re-assign a task from Person A to Person B? No problem - Accelo re-calculates your forecast profit in an instant. What about if expensive Person C logs a bunch of time on a milestone assigned to Person D? No worries - Accelo will update your profitability forecast too. The forecast profitability calculations take into account materials or non-time elements too, which is handy.
Accelo also shows you your real-time profit and profit margin for the time that has been logged under the "Used" heading. This means that, as your team log their hours, Accelo takes note of their cost and factors that into the billable rates on the milestones and tasks to show you how much profit on a time basis the project has made (and at what margin) in real time. We don't include materials in the "used" calculation, however, because we don't want to have a project seem exceptionally high (or low) in profit margin from the get-go, when very few (or even no) hours have been logged.
The Progress reporting in the previous version of Accelo was good in theory, and horrible in execution. We were basically taking the hours that had been logged and comparing them to the hours logged plus hours remaining. For projects that used staff rates and value-based estimating (which, to be honest, applies to most of you) this meant that the progress reports were wildly optimistic, as the system was doing a terrible job of factoring in that a $3,000 milestone which has only two hours of work done might actually have a lot more work left to do.
The new progress reporting is much much smarter. Now we take into account the billable rate of the person assigned to the milestone or task, so even if there aren't any "hours" defined, we're still able to make a pretty good guess of how much work is ahead. Of course, if users then go in and specifically say how much time is remaining (which they can do any time they log work on a task), we use that signal instead of our guess.
The result is a progress calculation that adjusts as you and your team do work, reestimate the time remaining and complete their milestones and tasks - just as it should do.
Another big improvement with the new interface is around reporting progress to schedule. This feature involves looking at the number of days the project plan, taking the start date of the project as the kick off and then seeing how far through the project you and the team are in elapsed time.
