My 3 Favorite Features for High Impact Improvements

By Nadia Chang, Senior Business Consultant at Kantata

Kantata is a powerful platform that allows for multi-faceted management of projects and resources. And while there are many ways that Kantata can help a professional services organization, leveraging the different features of Kantata will allow you to optimize the data outputs you can get from the platform. As a Senior Business Consultant at Kantata, I have been implementing our software for clients over the past two years and have had the chance to experience and witness what have been the most beneficial features for my clients.

Here are just a few of my favorites that you can use, no matter your goals or unique demands:

Centralized Communication

If you have any experience in the world of professional services, you already know that getting hundreds of emails a day to stay on top of the numerous projects you’re managing is exhausting.

With Kantata’s built-in project-specific activity feeds, users are able to streamline their communication by project easily and efficiently. This not only allows any user on the project to stay in the loop for communication, but it also allows team members to refer back to historical messages regarding the project with a simple search. You, as a user, also have the ability to adjust what you are notified about and the frequency in which you receive notifications. For example, on projects where a user is an individual contributor, you can adjust the post notifications to only be sent to you if you are @ mentioned, versus on a project where you are the Project Manager, you can keep the notifications settings on for all posts to monitor what is happening across all workstreams on that given project.

Forecasted and Actual Hours

One of my favorite features that Kantata offers is the ability to compare estimated or forecasted hours to what your team is actually logging. This feature enables increased accuracy in two main areas: Scoping & Bandwidth Planning. 

Scoping Accuracy

Being able to see what you estimated by phase or deliverable of an SOW and then comparing it to what actually was logged will better shape your future scoping methodology. Over time, you’ll have enough data in the system to make an educated adjustment to how much you charge for a given phase, deliverable, or service. 

For example, say sales prices out your service by estimating 20 hours in Phase 1 and 40 hours in Phase 2 of a project with a total average bill rate at $200/hour. This means your project comes out to $12,000. But after you implement your project, you realize it took your team 74 hours to complete. Over time, as more and more projects that offer the same service(s) are completed, your company would have enough data to make an informed decision to adjust your scoping accordingly to achieve target margins.

Bandwidth Accuracy

Secondly, clients are very keen on ensuring they are optimizing their employee fleet by implementing billable utilization targets across their organization. With actuals versus estimates, you can analyze whether or not you’re assigning enough work for a team member to hit their utilization targets or if you have the ability to assign more. You can also be flagged for any potential burn-out faster. For example, maybe you’ve estimated their workload to be 75% billable work, but based on their actuals, they are actually at 95% billable. In having this data, you can make critical decisions, like whether or not you can lessen the internal initiatives this resource is working on to give them some of their time back for billable work.

Project Burn Within the Project Plan 

Being able to quickly and accurately understand how fast your project budget is being spent can make a world of difference to the financial health of your organization. And this is where project burn plays a critical role. The neat feature of project burn, whether it be hour burn or dollar budget burn, can be viewed at the task level within a project plan. Project managers love this feature as they are able to more effectively manage the time that is spent by task, phase, or deliverable and guide the project to burn as optimally as possible. 

Knowing you are burning hot on a project earlier will help a project manager better manage the resources’ use of time and also flag the client as potentially needing more leadership oversight or direction.

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