Increased productivity and profitability of the execution department

Challenges

The collaboration between NAV24 and Casbeg, a strategic partner in business development, lasted for a year. It focused primarily on supporting marketing, sales, and customer service.

One of the main problems we identified was the delivery team’s time planning. The exact amount and value of time the team dedicates to each project were unknown. We’ve estimated that the implementation team spent only 60% of their time on billable client work. From our perspective, this situation represents a significant potential for increasing the profitability of the company we are working with.

Another important area was determining and monitoring each project’s profitability. To achieve this, we needed to measure various intermediary indicators contributing to project profitability, such as employee resource utilization and planning, sales planning, upselling, and more accurate pricing of future projects.

Solution

When analyzing the issue of profitability, we must remember that it has three dimensions, each requiring a separate focus:

• Profitability of the company as a whole,
• Profitability of individual employee teams,
• Profitability of specific projects and clients.

To enable NAV24 to monitor profitability on these three levels, we conducted an audit of the team’s hours. We then created a comprehensive process for planning and monitoring project profitability and resource planning within the team. This involved using a time-tracking tool and spreadsheets containing information about work hours and finances allocated to each project.

As a result, NAV24 continuously measures the actual costs of project servicing and the time employees spend on them. This allows for timely responses to exceeded project assumptions, directly impacting profitability in the client’s industry.

The NAV24 team took it further by connecting the created data spreadsheet with Microsoft Power BI. This enables dynamic report generation, giving every team leader and employee access to check their own profitability and the profitability of the projects they participate in.

Additionally, monitoring work hours led to the creation of hourly budgets. Each employee has a budget of hours allocated to projects and internal tasks (e.g., managing internal marketing, education, and other non-client-related activities), meaning everyone in the organization knows in advance who will spend how much time on selected non-client-related actions in a given month.

This facilitates easy and quick calculations of internal labor costs, more efficient task management within the company, and the elimination of tasks that should be handled by someone other than highly paid customer service specialists, making the team feel more efficient and productive. A pleasant side effect is also the increased availability of specialists for clients.

Monitoring indicators also led to the establishment of a vacation policy. When someone requests time off, it is clear how many hours must be redistributed within the team to maintain productivity. This naturally contributes to rational vacation planning and allows department managers to effectively plan long-term tasks without the risk of overloading employees covering for team members on leave.

Finally, we jointly set a reporting goal of at least 80% of working hours during the day (6.5 hours out of an 8-hour workday). The remaining 1.5 hours include activities such as morning coffee or lunch breaks, which occur daily but do not benefit the company or clients.

Results

After implementing time reporting and project management processes, NAV24 achieved:

• An increase in the share of client service work (billable) during the workday from 65% to 99%,
• An increase in reported billable hours from approximately 60% to 74%,
• Better planning of teamwork and greater awareness of utilized work time (among both management and team members),
• Improved revenue forecasting (2 months in advance),
• Implementation of a vacation policy,
• More accurate pricing of new projects,
• Better allocation of expert resources.

Would you like to achieve similar results in your business? We’d love to have you as a client. Feel free to contact us at [email protected]