business management – David Bailey

Theresa May stood outside Number 10 after her audience with Her Majesty the Queen on Friday and announced that she will now form a Government to provide Britain with “certainty”. Really? The only thing more certain coming out of this election is that the country has a much stronger second party in Opposition than was the case before she called it.

Whatever your political persuasion, we are faced with a “fog of uncertainty” as Larry Elliott wrote in The Guardian, investors are “unnerved by economic uncertainty” as reported on the BBC, and business leaders are “appalled at the prospect of more political uncertainty” as Sarah Gordon reported in the FT.

So should we be despondent? What does all this uncertainty mean, for business and for our Professional Services and IT Services industry in particular?

Well, let’s take a look at what needs to happen in the wake of recent events. Both Public Sector departments and private sector businesses have a broader range of forward Brexit scenarios to consider than they thought before and they’ll need help with scenario planning now and with solution design and implementation later. Security, both physical and cyber, needs another round of thinking and additional solutions to be implemented to make citizens, consumers and businesses be and feel better protected. Businesses with strong export trade have a window of opportunity to exploit with an even weaker pound – let’s help them expand in existing overseas markets and conquer new ones. Equally, our own services are now even cheaper to buy by non-UK clients for a period – we should be talking to our international client base and capitalising on this.

Quite apart from these, there’s a huge amount of change happening that has no link to whether things are certain or uncertain in UK politics – the pace of change won’t slacken just because of a somewhat unexpected election result. We’re heavily involved in lots of this change and the demand for our expertise and resources won’t diminish any time soon as:

consumers continue to utilise digital channels alongside traditional ones, requiring omni-channel business strategies and integrated IT and supply chain solutions
software manufacturers push their customers towards their shiny cloud-based solutions and the customers have to decide whether to go with this and the IT transformation programmes that result or stick with existing systems that work well enough but which may need to be self- or third party-supported
big data gets ever bigger – analysing data and extracting the critical intelligence needed to make business decisions swiftly is becoming ever more important
the opportunities created by artificial intelligence become better understood – it’s not just about automated factories any more
….and so on….

The political environment may be uncertain but the future for our industry is bright!

Most services businesses, from law firms through consultancies to outsourcers, rely on people entering time into timesheets. At the most basic level, timesheets provide some form of audit trail that work has been done and, not least in Time & Materials projects, they provide data to support a fortnightly or monthly bill to the client. Most firms have now moved beyond paper or spreadsheet-based timesheets and have either built or bought a simple timesheet system. So far so good.

Unfortunately, complexity and human nature then enter the fray! Consultants and associates dial into the timesheet system at the end of the week (if you’re lucky!) and input a mixture of reality, the way they remember things and/or the answer that the project manager tells them to enter – filling in the timesheet is a mechanical exercise, a chore! Project managers use a timesheet approval process to manipulate reality to reflect the time estimates given in the project plan. Also, there may or may not be a company policy in place about the “professional day” and how timesheet data is used to create client invoices – for example, if the (very!) simple figure below showed an individual’s timesheet for a single week, how many days would you charge the client for Project A?

Hours worked	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thurs	Fri	Sat	Sun
Project A	8	10	6	11	2	0	2
Business Development	0	0	3	0	2	0	0
Internal/Other	1	0	1	0	5	0	1

Depending on firm policies and client contracts in place, any one of the following (and more!) could well be correct:

– 5 days

– 4.875 days

– 5.2 days

– 4 days.

In passing, we used to have a timesheet code for “Internal/Other” – it took some time before we realised that it was being used as a bucket to enter time into when it wouldn’t fit anywhere else!

What we need is an internal culture whereby people enter their actual hours worked honestly into a timesheet system that is easy to use and clever enough to apply different sets of rules by project depending on company policy and client agreements (e.g. “a day’s a day” or “”a day is a period of eight hours with part days charged pro rata”)…..but that’s just the billing bit!

If the system can also compare actual time entered with what was expected when an assignment was set up, it can then report out variances to client Partners, project managers etc. to allow them to address project issues, identify potential training needs and learn about over/under estimates applied during the sales process. I’d like it to go further, however, and hold data about resource costs too so that we can understand, without resorting to endless spreadsheet analysis, real gross margin figures and compare them with plan, and highlight the right assignments to be discussed at Partner level…..now it becomes a more powerful and useful business management tool!

When used properly, timesheets contain a wealth of information that can be used to help the Partner team to optimise their business and keep their consultants fresh and ready for the next challenge.

Tag: business management

The future’s uncertain…….and bright!

Lifting the timesheet curse!