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So we discovered SCRUM
One day I was listening at a case study at the technology park held by a friend of mine ( thank you Jugoslav ) where he introduced us to SCRUM. He said they used it in a production environment for a while with great results.
Scrum is an agile framework for completing complex projects. Scrum originally was formalized for software development projects, but works well for any complex, innovative scope of work.This looked really promising, I thought, so I started thinking how to incorporate those principles in the business platform we were developing at the time. I knew we would not do it by the book, I knew that we were not ready to do all the SCRUM routine including ScrumMasters, Sprints and stuff. But still I think that the Waterfall method is great and braking each task into separate activities is a must in an efficient project management environment. So I came up with an interesting approach to task and project management which combines classic techniques like GANTT charts for complex projects, users and resource management approaches and some agile project management techniques taken from SCRUM.
Our own solution
The end result was a simple on-line project management module which is integrated with our CRM and available to all employees. The real revelation came when I gave access to the project management platform to all our employees. Suddenly everyone was involved in the creation and management of projects, tasks, activities, support tickets etc. This decentralization ment that we no longer needed a dedicated project management because everyone in the company took care of managing their own work. Suddenly everyone knew what they needed to do to complete a task and everyone was feeling better about their work, because everyone knew what they were working on all the time.
Here are the results
And so did I, finally I had a deep insight into everyones work and I was able to see the big picture for the first time ever. After about 3 months of implementing the new project management module into the company the results were stunning. We managed to cut unfinished projects by 50% ( I remember going from 30 to 15 open projects ) and we were able to invoice our customers around 30% more billable hours.
In the past 3 years we registered over 7700 individual activities in our task management application, each activity has a description, an owner, a client, an expected duration and the time spent on that activity. In a team of 10 people this means on average 3 activities per person per day. At an average of 2h 15min per activity, we managed to delegate around 6h 45min of work per person per day. I also know we managed to bill on average over 8 hours of work per person per day, this means we were able to bring productivity quite high. So far so good, but what is next.
We will take the same lesions learned in the previews years inside our company and make them available to everyone within Beezway, so I hope that many more people will be able to benefit from our findings. Task management should be at the core of every business so it will be at the core of Beezway to.
Hmm... Deliverig 6,75 an charging 8. I hope not to be your client soon. If you manage to hide that... What else are you hiding from you clients? This is not agile at all!
well, someone has to pay for activities that are mayne not implemented in the project tasks. Such as phone calls to clients and answering emails, both of which amounts to quite some time in every serious business and might not be part of project management.
Yes?
Well, most service businesses either bill their clients by the hour or by project. Most of our work is project based and clients are invoiced the contractual value of a project, we (almost) never billed extra hours for a project.
In the first case ( billed hours ) the only fair thing to do is to invoice your client the actual hours you spent on his project, if you use some kind of agile project management approach this means that your client will be billed less hours if you are doing things right. We also use this approach when working on customer support and additional work, which amounts to less than 15% of all work done in our company. In this case your higher productivity has a positive impact on customer happiness, but there is little you can do on your bottom line.
In the case of contractual project work, your customer pays always the same amount of money ( not hours! ) no matter how much time you spend on the project - we have a contract. So the time ( = money ) spent on a project is up to you and your team's skills and of course on your project management methodology. Here is where agile project management can make a huge difference on your bottom line. And here is where the difference comes in, we expect a project to take let's say 80 hours, but we manage to finish it 65. You have also to take in consideration that we do give discounts to loyal customers and instead of actually lowering our hourly rate, we have some spare time we can use for that purpose.
In the old days, before we started managing our work with an agile approach, we didn't have a clue on how much resources we spent on a project besides a rough idea. What we knew was that every project took way to much time to finish and that we were constantly low on resources.
Today we manage to finish most of our project well within the expected time-frame, which means that customers are actually happier and we have some spare time in case something goes wrong. This is why we (almost) never over-bill our customers, we manage to have some discount margin and we are making some good profit along the way.
So next time ask your self who you want to work with, an agile profitable company or someone who sells you every single hour spent on your project. I know where I want be :)
"...we (almost) never billed extra hours for a project." hehehe
The EditorStudios company - owners and subcompany's like Maribor EditorStudios think that they are the best. So not true!!! The customers must pay for something that they (Editor) don't do :). And theirs CMS MyPortal? Are you kidding me?
Please don't mix things up. This is how franchising works. Editor Studios is Editor's franchising brand. There are 6 companies working under this brand, and the purpose of our franchisees is to offer good solutions at reasonable prices. There is so much more than just the brand, what we do is the culmination of 7 years of R&D in the web development sector and we have won quite some awards for our work. Some franchisees perform better than others but we constantly try to maintain a high quality of service all over the network by monitoring the work of each franchisee and help them to be better and better. What we bring to the table is great value for money, good design, great support and a very polished CMS.
I respect every opinion, but no one can take seriously comments from anonymous people :)