Quality Improvements vs The Need for Project Efficiency
The question of quality vs project efficiency comes up a lot for professional services providers, but are they mutually exclusive, or can they both be improved at the same time? Many companies are actually unaware they are making a choice between the two, but almost every aspect of a project’s delivery involves some level of compromise between quality improvement and the need for efficiency.
The truth is that quality or efficiency does not need to be a choice. There are some strategies you can implement to provide a boost to both, allowing you to deliver projects quickly and profitably, while reaching a level of quality your project team can be proud of and your clients will be delighted with.
1. Set up a project management office (PMO)
Successful projects are the bread and butter of professional services organisations, so it’s essential you develop a repeatable process for the delivery of high quality, profitable projects that are delivered on time. One answer to the resource bottlenecks and escalating costs that stand in the way of efficient, quality projects is to set up a project management office (PMO). This acts as a central hub for all project related information.
A PMO can really empower your project delivery. According to PMI’s 2017 Pulse of the Profession® more organisations are discovering the value of project management offices (PMOs).
On a day-to-day basis, the PMO is responsible for monitoring the performance of projects, tracking their budgets, prioritising projects where there are conflicting project resource requirements and ensuring resourcing requirements can be fulfilled across the business. It can also help project teams adhere to best practice and identify areas where additional training is needed.
2. Invest in Hydra EXM
Hydra EXM plays an important role in your ability to deliver project efficiency and consistency, ensuring a high level of quality and no errors or delays. Hydra EXM will allow you to deliver best practice across all projects by capturing the lessons learnt from previous projects to create a ‘project blueprint’. This project blueprint can then become a model of future projects you can follow to govern project delivery. Hydra EXM can act as a central hub for all your resource planning, helping to level set the utilisation of resources, making sure the required skills are matched to tasks. The result is a boost to both the efficiency and quality.
3. Turn services into products
Clients expect more and more from professional service providers, so it is your job to adapt to these changing needs to give them what they want. One way to achieve this is by productising your service offering. So, rather than selling your time, you are selling pre-packaged ‘products’. This approach removes much of the complexity and unpredictability surrounding time and materials billing, and gives you a much more controllable and measurable method of selling and delivering professional services.
By transforming your services into products in this way, you will be able to breakdown services into manageable and definable chunks, and determine the tasks, resources and materials you’ll need for each. By charging for a product rather than your time, it will also eliminate the risk of the project scope changing partway through the project, and provide a more accurate picture of exactly what will be delivered.
Above all, the productisation of your service offering will allow you to deliver more efficient and consistent projects, and offer your clients a level of transparency and clarity about exactly what they’re paying for which wasn’t available before.
How can Hydra help you increase the quality and efficiency of your projects? Discover more about Hydra Execution Management or download our infographic.
Find out how Hydra Execution Management has helped our Clients by reading some of the Case Studies.
