When it comes to directing a Professional Services team, staying organized is critical. One effective and productive way to keep a pulse on your team is to consistently track key metrics.
This month, we chatted with Craig Howarth, the Director of Professional Services at Nuago, to see how he keeps his team organized. Craig kindly shared his key metrics dashboard, which he uses in his role managing pre-sales, project management, and consulting services team members.
Craig utilizes a main Professional Services Key Metrics dashboard for himself, and provides individual dashboards to each of his team leads. Those team leads then customize their dashboards to fit their own specific needs, but all tie back to the main Professional Services Key Metrics dashboard.
Professional Services Key Metrics dashboard - view here
Here are some of the key metrics Craig and his team are tracking, and some context around why and how these metrics provide valuable insights:
- Billable hours by Work Role: This 12-week view helps Craig identify trends over time. Using a trend line, he can quickly see how close they are to their target utilization.
- The team's billable utilization: This gauge plots 3 lines - the team's combined capacity, the team's combined hours, and the team's target utilization (which is 75% of their capacity). Nuago uses an adjusted capacity, removing PTO and holiday time from the equation. This helps them plan and schedule upcoming work and informs hiring decisions.
- Blended Rates: This helps track different billable rates and includes shared resources. The blend impacts their total revenue and gross margin. Nuago will budget on a blend for the year and then monitor against this gauge.
- Invoicing Metrics: This provides a near real-time view of what invoices have been sent to the customer, and a total to see how they are tracking against the target for the month.
- CSAT: An important KPI to gauge performance and a great way to share positive feedback with the team overall.
- Budget v Actual: Craig has created a calculation for effective utilization, measuring the ability to deliver an engagement against budget. It’s one of the key profit drivers along with utilization, billable rates, and resourcing costs. If their effective utilization metric is over 100%, they came in under budget and vice versa. Having this for open projects as well allows them to spot an issue and take corrective action.
- Project Costing Summary: Important in measuring true profitability as it takes things like discounting into account.
Thank you, Craig, for being our partner and sharing this great dashboard with us!
If you want to recreate and customize this dashboard for your team, check out the links below:
Professional Services Key Metrics Dashboard (public view link)
Professional Services Key Metrics Dashboard Buildout Key
Make sure to visit our library of more report and dashboard templates and please feel free to reach out to success@brightgauge.com with any questions!