Time is Money

On this episode of The AV Profession, Brad Malone joins Tim Albright to discuss real-time project numbers – financials, hours, payroll – what are some of the key numbers that integrators need to get right?

Financials are always important, but they are also a lag measure.

“In other words, you are looking at what happened in the past,” says Malone. “And many integrators are held hostage by payroll because people are putting their time in via the payroll system – that might be a weekly input or a bi-weekly input – but some of these projects are only a weeklong, so by the time you get to see any numbers, it’s over.”

Navigate believes the focus should be on hours as opposed to dollars. “Hours and effort are going to turn into dollars, but hours are what integrators are selling and it’s the effort that is needed to fulfill a deliverable,” says Malone.

How do the sales engineers or design engineers in your Integration business assign effort to tasks?

The effort estimate ought to be role-based and phase-based because a project moves through a life cycle. Integrators need to be estimating the way that they actually plan a project.

What we want to have is an apples to apples kind of correlation. How we estimated is how we planned is how we assigned resources is how those resources tracked. And then that’s also how we do analysis at the backend.

“I’m going to do pre-wire and then I’m on a leave for two weeks and then I’m going to come back and I’m going to do install. My estimate ought to be bucketed like that. How it’s formulated, how it’s planned is then how it’s scheduled and that’s how resources are assigned. So, if I have a tech doing pre-wire and install, those should be two time codes because they’re two different sets of activities with two different effort estimates.”

Also on the podcast:

What happens when your PMs don’t report all their time because if they did the project would be over budget?
Why should integrators make the shift from rewarding the estimate to rewarding the truth?
How can integrators improve the estimating process with transparency?