You are an expert in your industry, respected by your peers and appreciated by your clients. Large projects are successful due in significant part to the contribution of you and your team. Do you feel the same confidence when it comes to managing the people you engage with on a day to day basis?

There used to be a TV ad with a pumpkin farmer leaning on his Ute talking with his business advisor. Picture the farmer in scruffy clothes and dirty boots, and the advisor dressed up in a smart suit. The farmer says, “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. It costs me $1 to grow each of these pumpkins. I take them to market in the Ute and sell them for $1 each. Even though there’s no middle-man, I just don’t seem to be making any money.”

The advisor ponders. Eventually he comes up with a suggestion. “Maybe you need a bigger Ute.”

We’re more than halfway through 2018 and people still are using Excel timesheets!

These are the same people that get excited about driverless cars, being able to order your dinner from your smartphone or even having robots vacuum their house. The companies that give you these products are guaranteed not to record their precious information in something as simple as Excel, and neither should you.

Here are the signs it’s time to replace your Excel timesheets:

In your professional services business, putting in place and using measures to make sure you’re going the right way at the right speed is crucial. The thing is, all your business is selling is its expertise. There’s no stock in the warehouse to keep an eye on, no daily till-take to cash up. You’ve got a finite number of people with skills to do the work each day. They’re making money working for clients wanting deliverables done to as a high quality standard as quickly as possible. Day-by-day, managing work to be done and people to do it can mean the difference between your business doing really well, or lurching from one urgent issue to the next.

Project Planning and Management

Every growing business gets to a stage where directors and managers get this feeling they’re ever so slightly ‘out of touch’. Things are too busy. It can get worse quite suddenly. Founders aren’t seeing the progress they’d hoped the business would have made across the range of jobs at hand. At the end of each week,  and at month end there is outstanding work that should have been completed.

 

Obtaining buy-in on expectations of work to be done by your staff is part of the recipe for success. It’s not Big Brother. It’s business management. Shying away from discussions on expectations will result in Parkinsons Law prevailing. That benefits nobody.

 

If you’re a time based billing professional like an architect, land surveyor, cost estimator or consulting engineer you have nothing to fear in changing your time and cost software.