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Author: Curt Finch

Cutting Project Costs with a Scalpel, Not a Chainsaw

Written by Curt Finch on . Posted in Articles. 6 Comments on Cutting Project Costs with a Scalpel, Not a Chainsaw

From 1945 to 1965, the financial market in the U.S. moved upward. It then moved sideways until 1982, and up again until 2000. Right now, we are engaged in another great sideways movement. It could continue for another decade or so, and as businesses fail and members of congress pound their fists, it is natural to fear for the future.

These types of fears can be especially dangerous for businesses, as management often makes unwise decisions out of panic. For example, they might cut employees or reduce spending on many projects and programs that are good for the company. Consequently, many companies that slash costs in response to an economic recession find themselves unable to achieve top-line growth when the recession ends.

Extreme cutting of people and projects can be avoided, or at the very least, they can be performed with more intelligent precision. All that are required to handle such problems the right way are per-customer per-project profitability metrics.

Understanding costs is the first step towards understanding profitability. Most managers know how profitable the company is in general, but few of them know how profitable it is on a per-product or per-customer basis. Yet this level of understanding is necessary in order to develop and implement the right growth strategy. Think of it as the difference between performing surgery with a scalpel and performing it with a chainsaw.

How to Cut Costs with Precision

So how can you possibly know where you should cut and where you should not? It is actually rather simple once you have the right data. As it stands today, do all of the executives in your company know which of your past projects were successful? How many employees worked on them? How much time and resources were spent on them? Do you know which of your clients are profitable and which ones you lose money on?

Having this kind of information available is crucial while planning future projects and budgets. It enables you to make much more informed, financially sound decisions.

If you don’t know your costs on a per-project basis, then you have no way to validate

future project estimates. Was your previous project estimate accurate, both in scope for time and budget, or was it completely unrealistic? Which processes are working for you and which need to be improved? There is no way to answer these questions unless you are tracking time on projects, and not knowing these answers is especially dangerous during a recession.

Where to Begin

Get your employees to track their time on a per-project basis. Yes, everyone hates timesheets, but they can make an enormous difference to the success of your business, especially when the economy is down. The time data you collect will alert you to when projects are in trouble much earlier, giving you the opportunity to do something about it before it is too late. You will also learn which projects are consuming too much time and which clients are cheapest to service. During an economic recession, you will be able to “fire” your unprofitable customers and work hard to keep the profitable ones happy.

Next Steps

Once your company is tracking time, you will need to add labor rates to the data. The time of one employee can cost the company more than the time of another, and those costs add up on major projects. It is also important to track all expenses. For instance, some projects and customers use up more travel expenses than others. Collecting all this data on a per-project basis can help you understand true direct per-project cost, giving management better insight into how to cut costs with precision.

It is also necessary to allocate indirect costs in order to paint the full picture of where your company spends money. There are two types of indirect costs: general indirect costs, such as rent, that need to be allocated across every project in the company, and semi-indirect costs, such as customer relationship management, which should be applied to all projects for the customer in question. For general indirect costs, you will need to create an allocation formula for each type: marketing, legal fees, office rent and electricity, etc. For semi-indirect costs, there is a different process. If you have a large customer you do multiple projects for, there are usually some costs that apply to those projects as a group, but not against any particular one of them. In this case, you might allocate these semi-indirect costs by revenue or direct cost over those projects.

Per- Project Profitability

Once you understand per-customer per-project profitability, you will have a significant advantage over your competitors, not only during a recession but during good times as well. They don’t know where their profits come from but you do, so when you have to make cuts, you can easily calculate ROI on various projects and isolate the unprofitable work. Regardless of the economic climate, knowing where you are profitable and where you are not is the only way to thrive in a competitive business environment.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below

Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx. Journyx offers customers two solutions to reach the highest levels of profitability: Journyx Timesheet – a timesheet and expense management solution for the entire enterprise – and Journyx ProjectXecute – a solution that unites project and process planning with resource management. Journyx has thousands of customers worldwide and is the first and only company to establish Per Person/Per Project Profitability (P5), a proprietary process that enables customers to gather and analyze information to discover profit opportunities. Curt is an avid speaker and author, and recently published “All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy: Valuing Time as a Business Resource.” Curt authors a project management blog and you can follow him on Twitter.

What Mismanaging Small Projects Will Cost You

Written by Curt Finch on . Posted in Articles. 7 Comments on What Mismanaging Small Projects Will Cost You

Okay, so maybe you have the large projects nailed in Microsoft Project, but what about the smaller ones that, in reality, make up the bulk of your portfolio? Are you just “winging” those, using status emails and Excel spreadsheets to manage them? If so, you could be making a great mistake.

Small projects, while often overlooked, are still crucial to a company’s success. Since they might not involve large sums of money, many companies do not worry as much about them, but all of these small projects can add up to some major costs if managed improperly.

Best Practices

Top project managers know the best practices for their large projects, but what many do not realize is that these techniques can be applied to smaller projects as well. An article recently published in ProjectSmart affirms this: “Applying the best practices to even a small project can be done without creating too much paperwork or overhead. The best practices are the things which countless project managers have done on thousands of projects and are deemed to be the ‘best practice’ because they tend to help you to achieve the best results. Don’t think that because you’re managing a small project that you can ditch these best practices because if you do, you will regret it later when your project gets in a mess.”

Here are a few of the key best practices to keep in mind for your small projects as well as the large ones:

1) Tracking Actuals

All projects, regardless of size, are executed in order to bring in a positive return on investment, and since project cost today is mainly derived from the cost of labor, tracking time to projects is absolutely essential for measuring ROI. How can an organization know what its true return is without understanding its true costs?

These data are not only crucial in understanding costs, but also in monitoring project status. Keeping tabs on the actual completed work hours at all times allows project managers to identify and address problems early on. For example, if 10% of the project work has been completed but 30% of the allocated budget has been spent, there is a serious problem. Project managers who track employee actuals will find this out early enough to actually do something about it, while those who do not will simply find themselves over budget in the end. The project might be a small one with a small budget, but cost overruns can add up fast and really hurt the organization. Besides, in times like these, can anyone afford to be so careless with their budgets, large or small?

2) Understanding Resource Allocation

When you assign project tasks and deadlines to employees, how do you know if they have the time to get them done or not? Are you sure that they won’t be on vacation, working on a different project, or spending the month in meetings? Project managers must know who is available to do the work before they assign tasks to people (or, better yet, before they decide to take on a project at all). Simply assigning tasks to team members without regard for their current and future allocation, including upcoming vacation time, is unwise. If the person you need on your project is completely booked with non-project work or plans to backpack across Europe all summer, you need to know. Your goal might be to complete the project on time, but it will never happen unless the resources are available when you need them to be.

Not only should resources be available to do the work, but they should be the right resources. In other words, different projects require different types of employees. If a programmer is needed for a project, the project manager must have the ability to search for one who is available for the specific time frame. Managers can also use this information to identify staffing gaps. If there is only one programmer who is consistently overbooked, it is time to hire additional programmers. Yet without insight into resource allocation, management might not know that this programmer is working too hard until he or she burns out and quits.

As I mentioned earlier, status emails and Excel spreadsheets are simply not sophisticated enough to handle project management, even on a small scale. For one thing, these tools lack the centrality and flexibility that a project and resource management system can provide. Let’s say a department manager assigns an employee to a new project, cutting his available time in half, unless this is properly documented and communicated to the entire project team, how will the project manager know to revise his or her timelines? How will the other team members know that their tasks, contingent upon this employee’s work, cannot start until six weeks later?

Resource allocation changes all the time, and project managers need a solution to keep this information up-to-date, and accessible at all times. Not only should everyone on a project team know what is going on, but changes and adjustments like these should also roll up to the general project plan.

3) Managing Work Requests

Do you, as a project manager, schedule projects that your resources will not be able to finish on time? Another important best practice to apply to smaller projects is to give team members a voice. It might be tempting to just create project plans and demand that team members get it done, but that is a pretty unrealistic expectation that will set you up for project failure. It will also lead to low morale among your employees. A better way is to get input from team members on how long it will take them to complete certain tasks. A developer who has performed hundreds or thousands of similar tasks will be able to tell you right away how long it will take him/her to write that new piece of code while you, as a project manager, might have no clue.

It is also important to let team members communicate with you while the project is in progress. Small issues or holdups become big very quickly when unheeded. For this reason, project managers who implement project and resource management solutions should ensure that their team members will have the ability to request more time for their tasks when necessary.

Successful Projects of All Sizes

When project managers enforce time tracking, have visibility into resource allocation and give team members a voice, everybody wins. Applying best practices to your entire project portfolio is one of the best ways to drive success every time.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below

Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx (http://pr.journyx.com), a provider of Web-based software located in Austin, Texas, that tracks time and project accounting solutions to guide customers to per-person, per-project profitability. Journyx has thousands of customers worldwide and is the first and only company to establish Per Person/Per Project Profitability (P5), a proprietary process that enables customers to gather and analyze information to discover profit opportunities. In 1997, Curt created the world’s first Internet-based timesheet application – the foundation for the current Journyx product offering. Curt is an avid speaker and author, and recently published “All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy: Valuing Time as a Business Resource.” Curt authors a project management blog at www.project-management-blog.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/clf99.

Top Six Points to Consider when Choosing a PPM Solution

Written by Curt Finch on . Posted in Articles. 2 Comments on Top Six Points to Consider when Choosing a PPM Solution

According to a recent article in a leading technology magazine, the demand for project and portfolio management (PPM) solutions is rising in response to the weakened economy. Many businesses are choosing to implement PPM solutions in order to “identify which IT projects are mission critical and to help them execute those projects as efficiently as possible.” These customers have also found that PPM solutions offered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) are both more affordable and easier to deploy than traditional ones.

One of the problems many businesses face when choosing a PPM solution is wading through all of the functionality of complex solutions. It can be difficult to understand what functionality a business needs, as well as how to strike the right balance without paying for things that are not needed. When it comes to project portfolio management, most companies have two basic needs: to understand costs and profitability on a per-person, per-project basis, and to know who is going to work on which projects for the next few months. This means that resource allocation and project status, cost and time tracking should be at the top of any PPM shopper’s list.

Project portfolio management solutions are critical to organizations that manage many projects and people. Choosing the right solution, however, can be challenging, but there are some key criteria that businesses should focus on during the selection process.

  1. How Much Does It Cost?
    This is one of the first questions that any buyer asks. What is the cost of the solution? Do I have the budget for it? Extremely large organizations might not worry so much about the cost of a PPM solution, but for companies in the mid-market, a high total cost of ownership can be a deal-breaker. For this reason, it is important to compare vendor prices and offerings when looking at solutions. Larger PPM vendors have high entry costs and it may take a considerable amount of time to see a return on investment of such costly solutions. What many organizations do not realize is that there are also strong vendors emerging in the market with competitive pricing on project portfolio management solutions. It is worth a company’s time to do its homework on all competitors in the marketplace before making a final decision.
  2. How Long Will It Take to Implement?
    Often, organizations looking to purchase a PPM solution do not realize that they might spend one to two years waiting for it to be fully implemented. This means that the financial investment you are making right now will probably not bring in an ROI for a very long time. Savvy buyers must press vendors for real answers on what the implementation timeframe will be. It is also a good idea to ask to speak with other clients about their implementation experiences to ensure that the vendor delivers what is promised during the sales process.
  3. How Much of a Learning Curve Can I Expect?
    In addition to implementation, results can also be delayed by an excessive learning curve for you and your team. If a solution is simply too complicated for your organization’s needs, you will need to weigh this against the benefit of the complex functionality you are receiving. As I will discuss later, when it comes to PPM solutions, it is best to focus on what you really need rather than trying to have it all. If your new solution will require a seemingly endless training process for you and your staff, what will that do to your crucial projects? Some vendors offer implementation and training as part of their solution. This is a benefit that could potentially save your company time and money, and should be inquired about during the selection process.
  4. How Much Functionality Are We Really Getting?
    Functionality is another area where asking for customer references is key. A PPM vendor can promise you all kinds of fancy functionality, but when it comes down to it, is 100% of that functionality really going to be rolled out and used within your organization? A conversation with a few of the vendor’s clients should be able to answer this question for you. You shouldn’t be paying 100% of the price for a solution and only getting 50-80% of the functionality.
  5. Are These Vendors Really Experts in Project Portfolio Management?
    Most vendors will claim that they are industry experts, but how can you know for sure? Ask yourself this: Is your vendor claiming that their solution does it all? Common sense tells us that those who do it all don’t often do it well. Rather, those who specialize in a few core competencies are in a much better position to excel. When you hear a vendor tell you that they can do it all, isolate the functionality you need most (e.g. project time tracking, resource management, etc.) and ask them specific questions on these areas.

    In addition, many vendors will send IT staff to implement their software solution. This is good from a technical standpoint, but as project managers, do you really feel that an IT person with no experience in project management can implement and configure the solution to meet your specific needs? It is important to ask vendors about the staff who will be providing professional services, and try to select the vendor that has experts in both technology and project management on the team.

  6. Is the Solution Hosted as Software-as-a-Service?
    In the previously mentioned technology article, a program director for IDC’s application lifecycle management research predicts that the demand for hosted PPM solutions will continue to rise. There are many reasons for this. First, SaaS solutions have a lower cost of entry and lower risk than locally installed solutions. Not only that, but SaaS solutions put very little burden on your organization’s already overworked IT staff. In addition, if you select the right vendor, you can rest assured that your data is more secure than it might be in your own hands. SaaS vendors must provide a secure data environment, or they’re out of a job. Data must be backed up religiously, and security is the top priority. Customers can rest assured their data security is probably better with a hosted solution — not worse.

In conclusion, when looking for a project and portfolio management solution, buyers must ask the tough questions and carefully weigh their choices in order to ensure that they get the solution that works best for their company. Unfortunately, many businesses are often attracted by flashy demos and lofty promises that are impossible to deliver. By knowing what to ask, you can minimize the risk of implementing what some unhappy PPM customers have referred to as “a million dollar timesheet.”

Don’t forget to leave your comments below

Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx a company offering customers two solutions to reach the highest levels of profitability: Journyx Timesheet – a timesheet and expense management solution for the entire enterprise – and Journyx ProjectXecute – a solution that unites project and process planning with resource management. Journyx has thousands of customers worldwide and is the first and only company to establish Per Person/Per Project Profitability (P5), a proprietary process that enables customers to gather and analyze information to discover profit opportunities. Curt is an avid speaker and author, and recently published “All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy: Valuing Time as a Business Resource.” Curt authors a project management blog and you can follow him on Twitter.

Using the Requirements Creation Process to Improve Project Estimates

Written by Curt Finch on . Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on Using the Requirements Creation Process to Improve Project Estimates

Estimation can be one of the most difficult parts of a project. Important questions must be asked in order to form the right figures and plans. How long will the project take? How many resources will it consume? Consultants may also ask the following question: What is the appropriate amount to bid on this project? These questions are not easy to answer at the outset when one generally has only a vague idea of what will be required throughout the project.

The good news is that there is a fairly simple way to improve project estimation and, consequently, the bidding process. Most people do not realize that the requirements creation process can lend insight into the length and scope of a project. Let me give you an example of how this method works and then explain how you can implement it within your own company.

The Story

Back in 1992, I was working for a consulting company named The Kernel Group (TKG). During this time, I was put in charge of porting Tivoli’s software from Sun’s Solaris operating system to IBM’s AIX operating system. The project was to be done under a fixed bid, and consequently, we at TKG knew that estimating the effort required to port the code was of paramount importance.

I looked at the code with a coworker of mine, and he came to the conclusion that if Tivoli didn’t make the project hard for us in some unspecified way, we could port the million or so lines of code in about a weekend. I told him that he was nuts – that it would take at least a week, maybe even two. We jointly decided that we probably ought to call it three weeks just to be safe. We also decided, rather smugly, not to report our padding of the schedule to evil upper management.

As a result, evil upper management drastically expanded the project bid to $325,000, and my coworker and I thought that this was a ridiculously high price. We believed that we were gouging the customer and that they would never accept it.

Yet they did accept it, and once the project began, we proceeded to discover how truly terrible we as software engineers were at the task of project estimation. To make a long story short, the porting schedule expanded to exceed our original estimate and we consumed not only all of the $325,000, but a whole lot more on top of it.

The Formula

Now our consulting company was religious about tracking employee time on a per-project basis, and so we broke every project into phases: requirements/specification, design, coding, testing, debugging, documentation, training, etc. This project was no different in that respect; we broke it down into its respective phases as well.

Just before we started working on the project in question, I read a book called Practical Software Metrics for Project Management and Process Improvement by Robert B. Grady. (By the way, this is a truly fabulous book that I would highly recommend to anyone who is managing software development projects.) According to the book, one of Grady’s rules of thumb is that 6-8% of every software project is usually eaten up in the requirements/specification phase.

One of the conclusions that Grady comes to in his work is that you can use this fact to estimate total project size. In other words, if it took 60 hours to do the specification, that’s probably 6% of the job and the job will be 1000 hours. Following such logic, a six hour specification implies a 100 hour job. Since the specification always comes first in any project, you can get some pretty reliable estimates from this method alone. In fact, in my experience as both a programmer and the CEO of a software company, I have found it to be incredibly accurate and useful.

A second way to triangulate this project estimate is to ask experts in the area for their opinions – hopefully they will be better at project estimation than my coworker and I were that first time. A third way is to select an appropriate metric for estimation. For example, one could use line of code counts or function points in estimating the length and scope of software projects. For architecture projects, you might use number of pages in the drawings or square feet planned as similar analogies. Every project has some gross measure of its size that is available at the outset and can be used to plan the overall project in addition to this method I’ve described of tracking time against the earliest phases.

So back to the story. We really blew it on estimating and bidding on that first project for Tivoli, but when the next one came around, we had data on the portion of the overall project that the requirements phase had taken up. This allowed us to use Grady’s ratio to predict overall project size, and we found that on this second project, we came up with a very accurate project estimate. This worked very well for all of the subsequent fixed-cost consulting work we did for Tivoli.

Partially due to the strength of the solution and how well it ran on IBM’s AIX operating system, Tivoli was able to eventually sell their company to IBM for 743 million dollars in 1995.

For a consultancy that is doing fixed-cost projects, this concept of using the standard ratio of requirements phase to overall project length is a very powerful project estimation technique. It can eliminate erroneous bidding and its resulting costs, which is a major concern for such companies.

Accurate Bidding

Overbidding on a consulting job means that you won’t get the work in the first place, because the potential customer will give it to your competitor at a cheaper price. Underbidding, however, means you will win the deal and lose money. Neither situation is acceptable for businesses today, and yet, most consultancies do a poor job in this area. One way to make more precise bids is to use a key performance indicator, which is a tool used to measure progress towards a strategic business goal. For example, the number you want to minimize in this situation is defined by the formula [(E-A)/E], where:

E = estimated hours to complete the project
A = actual hours spent to complete the project

It is important to keep this KPI value as close to zero as possible, which indicates that you are bidding on projects more accurately.

Just tracking this number is a great first step towards better bidding, and you can get the necessary data to calculate it from any timesheet system, including a paper one. Automated timesheet systems, however, are generally even more effective in this area because they often have reports to calculate the KPI figure for you.

Improving adherence to your estimate can be difficult for some companies until they understand the ratio concept described above. An example of this is illustrated in the following diagram, which shows how the formula can work for any business. Your company’s magic number may not be 6-8% like Grady’s, but once you determine your own ratio for specification to total project length, you can use it again and again.

usingtherequirements1

Making it Work

I currently run a software company, Journyx, and I can assure you that this project estimation technique continues to be successfully employed by many of our customers to their great advantage. It is easy to implement and you can do it too. Once you do, you will start producing laser sharp estimates before you know it. And that’s a result we can all feel good about requiring.

Happy estimating!

Don’t forget to leave your comments below

Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx. Journyx offers customers two solutions to reach the highest levels of profitability: Journyx Timesheet – a timesheet and expense management solution for the entire enterprise – and Journyx ProjectXecute – a solution that unites project and process planning with resource management. Journyx has thousands of customers worldwide and is the first and only company to establish Per Person/Per Project Profitability (P5), a proprietary process that enables customers to gather and analyze information to discover profit opportunities. Curt is an avid speaker and author, and recently published “All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy: Valuing Time as a Business Resource.” Curt authors a project management blog and you can follow him on Twitter.

How to Avoid Being Seen as ‘Project Management Overhead’

Written by Curt Finch on . Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on How to Avoid Being Seen as ‘Project Management Overhead’

We are currently facing a challenging economic climate which is forcing many companies to cut costs in order to survive.  There are different ways of doing this, and unfortunately, a popular one is slashing employees, projects and even entire departments.  Consequently, almost everyone in the business world is now looking for a way to justify their work to upper management and other stakeholders in order to be spared.

Many executives do not fully understand the value of the PMO in their organization, endangering the survival of the PMO when the time comes to cut back.  In fact, Josh Nankivel of PMStudent.com recently polled project managers about how the economic climate is affecting them, and he found that 27% had experienced project cutbacks, 14% had experienced PM layoffs, 11% had experienced financial scrutiny of projects, and 10% had experienced project staff reductions.[i]

The answer to this problem is threefold: PMO managers first need to focus resources on the right projects, then ensure that these projects are successfully executed, and finally, effectively communicate the value of these projects to upper management.

Step 1: Refining the Focus

The PMO’s primary responsibility is to manage and execute projects that are central to the organizational goals and objectives.  This requires an understanding of both the business strategy and the projects that fall beneath it.  Beyond that, it is important to know which projects are short-term, mid-term or long-term.  During a recession, many long-term projects are abandoned.  On the other hand, if you work solely on short-term projects, you will not be needed once they are completed.  For this reason, it is best for PMOs to focus their efforts on a combination of short- and mid-term projects that align with company strategy.

Step 2: Executing Projects on Time and on Budget

Prioritizing projects is important; successfully completing them is imperative.  No organization has any use for a PMO that does not achieve its goals and get things done.  There are several key components to accomplishing this.  First, project managers need visibility into resource allocation in order to avoid over- or under-booking project team members.  This will also ensure that no projects are taken on that your resources cannot accommodate.  In addition, team members need to track their time by task in order to provide actuals, helping project managers to understand true project costs and estimate future projects with accuracy.

When project managers can understand what resources are working on and measure actuals against forecasted timelines, they have a better handle on project problems, allowing them to address them faster and with more success.

Step 3: Communicating Results to Management

Once you have the positive project results, you need to ensure that top executives at your company are aware of them.  Fortunately, some solutions for managing resources and projects also have dashboards and reports to make this information quite clear.  This gives you an opportunity to tell the executives, “These are all the projects we are working on to help achieve our organizational objectives, and here is data that proves that we are executing them successfully.”  How can they possibly argue with accurate, up-to-date project data?

According to a statistic in the Project Times from “Shouldn’t there be a Middle-Enterprise Project Management System?”, 35 million project managers use Microsoft Excel as their primary project management tool, and 20 million use Microsoft Project.[ii] These tools can be useful in their own ways, but they certainly cannot provide the type of data that management needs to see from the PMO.  Rather, a solution that incorporates both project plans and time tracked against each project (by task) must be implemented in order to help executives see what the PMO is striving for and how well they are measuring up against these goals.

In 2008, Gantthead.com published an article entitled, “Is Your PMO a Profit Center?” which states, “Companies have long struggled with being able to measure the benefit of a PMO…”  The writer goes on to give readers the following advice: “Consider financial measurement for your PMO… and you may just find that senior managers look at your PMO with a whole lot more respect.”[iii] Such respect, which would have been valuable in the past, is absolutely crucial now.  Let’s face it: You wouldn’t be working on a project if some executive didn’t think it would have a positive return on investment (ROI), so these are the numbers that executives want to see.  If you can prove that you are bringing in a significant return on investment and keeping project costs down, they will not perceive you as useless overhead that can be cut without consequence.  PMOs who recognize this and use it to their advantage will have staying power, while others will not.

Prove It!

Ultimately, the best way to avoid being viewed as ‘project management overhead’ is to deliver real value to the organization, which means executing projects successfully.  It is not enough to create elaborate project plans.  The goal of the PMO is to execute these projects and help move the business towards its objectives.  Once you have a firm grasp on resource availability and have your team members tracking their actuals, you will be able to keep tabs on how the projects are going, as well as know who to talk to when there are bumps along the way.  Executive visibility into all of this data is also essential.

PMOs today have a choice – they can either justify their existence by highlighting their achievements and illustrating their true value, or they can fall by the wayside when cuts are made.  A project management solution that combines project tracking with financial reporting enables the PMO to speak the language of the executive and therefore succeed where others fail.

Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx (http://pr.journyx.com), a provider of Web-based software located in Austin, Texas, that tracks time and project accounting solutions to guide customers to per-person, per-project profitability. Journyx has thousands of customers worldwide and is the first and only company to establish Per Person/Per Project Profitability (P5), a proprietary process that enables customers to gather and analyze information to discover profit opportunities. In 1997, Curt created the world’s first Internet-based timesheet application – the foundation for the current Journyx product offering. Curt is an avid speaker and author, and recently published All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy: Valuing Time as a Business Resource. Curt authors a project management blog at www.project-management-blog.com.

[i] http://svprojectmanagement.com/impact-of-the-economy-on-project-management
[ii] http://www.projecttimes.com/articles/322-shouldnt-there-be-a-middle-enterprise-project-management-system.html
[iii] http://www.gantthead.com/article.cfm?ID=240289