All companies are only as good as the work they produce. For professional service businesses, the heart of the work they produce is done through projects. As professional service businesses continue to grow, it’s important to focus on increasing company-wide transparency. Having complete visibility into your projects could help prevent project failure, loss of clients or revenue or even prevent business failure. In order to gain complete visibility of your projects, here are four tactics for fostering company-wide transparency and prevent employee mistakes.
Despite good intentions from every employee, people make mistakes. One commonly made mistakes is with time tracking. Especially if your team has no way of automatically tracking their time, it’s easy for them to forget where their time was spent. Luckily with Accelo, time tracking is done automatically, even when emailing. This makes it easy for your team to continually do the work without having to worry about tracking their time. Then, at the end of the week, your team can see everything they did throughout the week and where their time was spent, without having to manually track it. Automating time tracking is a good way to eliminate that commonly made mistake.
You know when you are juggling several projects at the same time and you accidentally forget to inform one client of the status of their project, or you forget to send the weekly report to the executive team? If your client had their own portal, they could easily track the progress of their projects, which would eliminate the need for constant updates. Also, if your executive team had their own dashboard, they could easily pull the reports they need and track all projects just by logging in. With the right Service Operations Automation solution, your clients would have access to a client portal, and your executive team could log in and see the status of every project in the pipeline. With complete visibility, owners and managers of any small-to medium-sized business can effectively track the progress of all projects. Instead of having to find the time to speak to employees involved in various projects, an owner or manager can simply check on the status of the project via the Service Operations Automation solution. No more waiting to speak to employees about whether or not a project is on schedule. Simply log in to the application and check it out for yourself.
When business processes aren’t clear and accessible, it’s easy to lose track of who is responsible for what tasks and who should be held accountable when mistakes occur. If you don’t have a way of tracking communication or project tasks, how do you hold the right people accountable for unfinished work? With a Service Operations Automation solution, business processes are automated, making it easy for project managers to guarantee employee accountability. Not only that, but a Service Operations Automation solution also opens the door to clear and transparent processes so everyone can be aware of project statuses, which ensures employee accountability and fosters client trust. A transparent process gives everyone visibility into company-wide protocols and ensures complete accountability for all actions and tasks.
You just won over a new contract, and now you have to pick the best people for the project. The only problem is that you have no visibility into all of the skills your staff can bring and you don’t know what their schedule looks like. As a project manager, you need a Service Operations Automation solution so that you can easily access everyone's schedule and identify the best skills for the tasks. Instead of emailing five people to try and find a good fit, it would allow project managers and employees to look for specific employees trained in the skills they need to assign tasks to them or to ask them for assistance. This makes it so that people do not waste time emailing the wrong department and any issues with projects or clients can be handled immediately.
In the end, the right solution is not too far away. A Service Operations Automation solution can help you transform your business by giving you and your clients the visibility you need for your projects to be successful. You can easily eliminate unnecessary time-tracking mistakes, give your client and executive team access to track all projects and have access to scheduling the right people for the right tasks at the right time.
