Taking Practice Management To The Next Level
Hazle McCormack Young
The problem
With over 30 professional staff based in Tunbridge Wells and Canterbury and over 100 live projects the practice wanted to improve on the management of the projects, particularly with reference to forecasting. For 15 years the practice has been using a very comprehensive spreadsheet system built by one of the partners, John McCormack.
What we said...
“There were a few gaps in terms of functionality that hinged on the use of average rates and the ability to resource forecast. Plus, as with any Excel system it required an enormous amount of effort from John and the team to keep it up to date.”
Andrew Heath, Sales Director
The requirements
The key benefits that the practice wants to achieve by replacing the Excel system are:
- Saving 8-10 hours per month of Partner and Associate time spent running the system
- Ability to name variations with appropriate names rather than V001, this will help staff to log time appropriately and ensure that any additional fees are captured
- When producing a fee proposal the practice works out the anticipated resource costs as well as using the RIBA fee scales. Reusing the resource information to plan work in the office would help to increase productivity and reduce wasted time by comparing planned hours against actual hours on an ongoing basis
The benefits
What they said...
“PROJECTminder for Architects is clearly a mature, well designed and well thought out product. Having developed and maintained our own comprehensive system we knew exactly what we wanted – an integrated system that split fees and costs to work stages, with easy to use online timesheets, percentage complete by stage and live reporting.”
“We particularly liked the option to see how a project is performing graphically or in tabular format – we are confident that this will help all members of the team understand how their jobs are doing. This will also help them to understand why they need to fill in their timesheets each week!”
John McCormack, Partner
