Mind Your Own Business

If Your Business Has Grown, As Most Good Ones Do, You’ll Need More Than a Level Head To Keep Track Of New Projects

Anyone who runs a production company can tell you that there are two constant challenges: keeping your clients happy and managing your business. Both are essential for the health of the firm. Like most of us in this industry, I spend the majority of my time thinking about the former — coming up with creative ideas to solve clients’ problems, leveraging new technology to benefit their projects and giving the best possible customer service.

Unfortunately, managing the business always seems to come in a distant second. Staying on top of the production process, handling invoicing, creating estimates and understanding business metrics simply isn’t as fun. But as any business grows, the "managing" end of things requires increasing amounts of time and energy. Our business, Haley Productions, learned this firsthand and have spent the last three years developing a software solution that minimizes the effort needed to keep tabs on it all — and in turn, frees up more time to keep clients happy.

We’re a 12-person digital media production firm that specializes in interactive multimedia production, Web development and film and video production. We develop CD-ROMs, DVDs, kiosks, Webcasts, television commercials, and digital signage for tradeshows for a variety of clients from the healthcare, museum/institutional, corporate and broadcast sectors. In addition to our full-time staff, we regularly work with probably a dozen freelancers at any given time. We typically have between 30 and 40 projects in production simultaneously.

Twelve years ago, when I started the business, things were much simpler. We had one employee (me) and worked on one project (if I was lucky!) at a time. Managing the business was easy—a calendar pinned to the wall logged the start of each job, and an invoice, typed up and sent out once production finished, meant the job was complete. But as the business grew, things started to get more complicated. Employees were hired. Projects grew larger and were sometimes broken up into phases. We began doing progress billing, based on milestones. Some projects were fixed-fee, others were based on time and materials. Budgets, for both time and costs, became important. Much of my time was spent creating estimates and proposals. Before long, I found the majority of my time was being spent on trying to keep track of it all — and not enough time was being spent on the clients.

We cobbled together various makeshift solutions. First, the paper calendar was replaced by a wipe-off project calendar, which we quickly outgrew. Then came job sheets, folders, Excel spreadsheets, time clocks, document templates and an Access database — a cavalcade of good ideas that never really seemed to gel with the way we worked. We looked for a comprehensive off-the-shelf application, but nothing quite fit the bill for a production company like ours. Software packages were either too limited or too cumbersome and expensive. So in January 2002, we decided to create our own.

Designing the Perfect Software

Making up a wish list of all the functions we wanted to address was the easy part. Topping the list were production management issues. We wanted to be able to see a list of all active projects, together with key information such as due date, status, project manager and comments for each project. We wanted to be able to sort the information in any number of ways, so we could see, for example, projects listed by due date. We wanted the ability to create project teams, as well as a way to break work time down into categories, items and units that were meaningful to us. Of course, we needed an efficient way to enter and track time spent on each project and we wanted to make it easy for off-site freelancers to enter time, too.

Next, we needed a way to sort through this data to generate reports. We wanted the ability to review work time by project, by worker, by work item, by date and a whole lot more. We wanted to be able to see what work had been invoiced and what hadn’t. We wanted to be able to assign work to an invoice, and conversely, to see all the work that was applied to a particular invoice. We also wanted to track payroll for those part-time and contract workers whose compensation is tied to time worked.

The next area of interest for us was sales. For years, we had created estimates in Word or Excel. We wanted a better, faster, more professional way to generate estimates. We wanted an easy way to track proposals throughout the sales process, and to be able to convert an estimate to a budget once the proposal was accepted. We wanted to assign a probability to each proposal, to help us forecast future sales, and we wanted to track aggregate pending sales figures such as total gross, total net, margin, average probability, expected revenue and conversion ratio.

We realized that with the wealth of data we’d be collecting, we’d then be able to analyze company performance. There were three main performance areas we were interested in tracking. Utilization would show to what degree we were using our time productively, on both an individual and company level. We’d be able to break this data down by external (client) projects and internal (in-house) projects. The second area was work analysis. This would give us a breakdown of exactly how our time was being spent, again at both the individual and company level. The third area was profitability: We wanted to track budgeted versus actual hours, revenue and expenses, and calculate the variance. With that data, we’d be able to calculate the all-important effective hourly rate for each project.

Building the Perfect Tool

Once we built all this into our new tool, we gave it the eponymous name Project Tracker and set out to build it. We decided to make it a Web-based application so that there would be no client software to install and users could access it anywhere, using a standard Web browser. We assigned a three-person programming team and developed it using ASP.NET technology and an MS SQL database, hosted on a Windows 2003 server. Three years, 2,000 hours and countless revisions, modifications and enhancements later, it is finished.

I would describe Project Tracker as an online business intelligence tool. It incorporates project management, time tracking, sales, reporting and business analysis tools in one easy-to-use package. It’s specifically designed for companies that do project-based work and that bill primarily on a time or time and materials basis. Project Tracker is not accounting, traffic or production software. It works alongside existing software we use for those purposes. For example, we use QuickBooks for accounting and invoice generation, and Outlook for messaging and calendaring.

Without a doubt, Project Tracker has fundamentally improved our ability to manage the company. It has drastically decreased the amount of time spent on production management tasks, while at the same time providing us with real-time data that lets us make smarter, more informed business decisions. Everyone on staff uses it daily. It’s become an indispensable tool for us.

The decision of whether to create your own application or use an existing one will depend upon your firm’s particular needs and resources. Any firm with in-house programming talent and time can develop a similar solution. Alternatively, a Google search will show a dozen or more pre-built applications, each with its own bent. Ultimately, it comes down to finding a solution you’re comfortable with and that works in your world — so you can spend less time managing your business, and more time making your clients happy.