IT Consulting Company Improves Resource Allocation Over Multiple Projects with actiTIME

Time-tracking before

As the majority of consulting companies, Nash Srl.simultaneously runs multiple projects for different clients. Their work processes are mostly driven by specific customer and vary from project to project. When possible they follow Agile principles that provide them with desired flexibility and responsiveness to change.

The main difficulty for us was to keep control over the projects status and the effort spent to stay within the budget. Another challenge was to properly allocate all team members, avoid employee downtime, and track their activities for each project.

Marco Monselesan, COO at Nash Srl.

Accurate time tracking of all project activities was vital for keeping project deadlines, avoiding extra costs, and efficiently distributing team’s workload. Nash Srl. also needed to differentiate billable and not billable activities for the generation of invoices.

Initially, the company used spreadsheets but soon they encountered the limits of this tool. Excel templates took considerable time to prepare and still were unhandy to use. They didn’t provide the necessary level of detail on team’s activities, and it was hard to group and filter data for custom views. All together this made their consulting capabilities very limited.

Time-tracking after

When Nash Srl. decided to switch to an online time-tracking solution, the company ran a market research, and actiTIME turned out to have the best quality/price ratio.

The key step in using any software is adoption, and in Nash’s case it went smoothly. There’s an approval process for all time logs and time-off requests in the company. Employees should track their time daily, and manager approves their timesheets on a weekly basis. If by the end of the week, some timesheets are incomplete, actiTIME sends auto reminders to their owners taking this routine off the manager’s shoulders.

Thanks to intuitive interface and consistent reminders people quickly got used to adding their time logs on time. The result of switching from spreadsheets to actiTIME was immediately visible to the management. Nash Srl. improved their control over the allocation of time as they started to create granular tasks within each project instead of general ones. This approach helped them to understand how much time exactly is needed for each action which is later used for more accurate estimates and insights for improving efficiency of the work processes.

On top of that, integration with actiPLANS, and absence management system from the same suite, gives Nash’s manager complete overview of employee’s availability adding their time-offs and PTOs to the picture. This turned out to be extremely helpful for precise workload planning and eliminating bad surprises.

actiTIME reports show managers detailed time logs for all employees’ activities, their performance on different projects, time allocated to billable and non-billable tasks, and profit loss ratio for different projects. Billing reports also helped to improve customer satisfaction. Each week manager tracks overall project cost based on employees’ timesheets and takes necessary action to avoid billing clients more than expected. On project completion billing reports are used for automated invoice calculation.

Now we have complete transparency over the status of work and improved the resource allocation across the projects. And all this – with hours of work saved. Instead of manually fine-tuning the spreadsheet views, managers instantly view real-time analytics 
in custom reports. We forgot the spreadsheets like a bad dream.

Marco Monselesan, COO at Nash Srl.

In 2016 company switched from on premise to online actiTIME version. Such transition saved their costs on infrastructure and maintenance and improved overall user experience even more.