\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBoost your visibility now.
\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n
How clear is your visibility on your workload plan?<\/h2>\n
Just to remind you, the workload plan is like a calendar for your team, but more sophisticated. It\u2019s where every task, project, and resource is meticulously scheduled to avoid conflicts and maximize efficiency. Now, take a moment to reflect: how much visibility do you have on your workload plan? 1 week, 1 month, 3 months (be honest)?<\/p>\n This seemingly simple question is actually crucial. For any production manager, anticipating staffing needs, billing periods, and, by extension, the company\u2019s profitability is essential.<\/p>\n On average, agencies and service companies have visibility of only 1 to 3 weeks on their workload plans (ouch), which makes it challenging to anticipate and adjust recruitment and skills to ongoing projects.<\/p>\n Imagine a team of creatives in the middle of launching an ad campaign: without visibility on the coming weeks, you suddenly discover that JB, the key graphic designer, is going on vacation next week, leaving the team unable to finish the project.<\/p>\n This not only complicates anticipation but also makes it nearly impossible to adapt recruitment and skills to commercial needs.<\/p>\n At Furious, we\u2019ve found that having at least 2 months of visibility allows better anticipation of rush periods\u2014and, more importantly, peace of mind regarding your working capital needs. And no, achieving this level of visibility isn\u2019t impossible if you implement the right habits and tools.<\/p>\n The majority of agencies report having difficulty planning their resources more than two weeks in advance.<\/em><\/p>\n To improve this visibility, it is crucial to centralize information and make it accessible to all stakeholders. This makes it easier to anticipate unforeseen events and plan for vacation periods, customer absences and project validation phases. Using visual tools such as PERT diagrams or Gantt views helps to manage critical tasks efficiently, whatever the methodological framework you adopt (agile vs. v-cycle).<\/p>\n With over 5 years’ experience and more than 1,500 service companies supported, we’ve put together a checklist to help you plan ahead, anticipate and avoid rushes.<\/p>\n One of the main challenges for agencies is to centralize project information. This is one of the essential principles of project management<\/a> principles for ensuring global visibility and facilitating the anticipation of changes and unforeseen events.<\/p>\n By using project planning software, you can centralize all key data, visualize schedules, and efficiently anticipate the needs of your teams, while reducing errors due to scattered information. In complex projects, such as those based on the v-cycle, this centralization becomes even more crucial to ensure compliance with predefined milestones and avoid delays. This process of hierarchical \u201csilos\u201d runs counter to fluid collaboration, a criterion that is all the more important in service companies where employees rarely work alone on a project\/customer.<\/p>\n The result? A lack of communication can lead to delays, errors and poor coordination between teams.<\/p>\n Rush periods, when the time sold to complete a project comes to an end without the whole mission having been achieved, are frequent.<\/p>\n These high-pressure periods can lead to extra delays and work overload for teams, affecting the quality of the final work.<\/p>\n To avoid this, it is essential to share project visibility with all teams.<\/p>\n Our advice:<\/strong><\/p>\n Provide your teams with simple, real-time updated metrics (project dates, progress status, planned and billed workload) as well as visual schedules showing time allocated per person. For instance, you can set up alerts at strategic moments, such as when key stakeholders are on vacation, to better anticipate and plan ahead.<\/em><\/p>\n Looking for a better way to manage your resources? Look no further.<\/p>\n Furious allows you to visualize schedules and alerts you in real-time if there are any overruns (such as project budget consumption in terms of time spent, unfulfilled billing, etc.). You can control who sees what with varying levels of access, enhancing team synchronization.<\/p>\n \t\t\t Decentralizing the role of the production manager and giving visibility to all teams is a crucial first step to smooth planning.<\/p>\n Once this stage has been completed, make sure you have clear visibility at least 6 weeks ahead on signed projects, quotes in progress and available sales pipeline. This is an essential basis for structuring a clear project action plan<\/a>, anticipating skills requirements and aligning your resources with real priorities.<\/p>\n This will help guarantee that your production teams are adequately staffed. If not, you\u2019ll need to adjust your strategy and ramp up commercial activities, whether through new client acquisition (new business) or client retention (in-business).<\/p>\n Keep in mind that to remain profitable, your production teams should be staffed and spending 70 to 80% of their available time on billable projects. Based on this metric, you can also reorganize individual assignments to maximize the value they deliver to the company.<\/p>\n Ready to move on to the next step?<\/p>\n Generally, our clients come to us in one of two scenarios. Either they are in a growth phase, looking to structure their business and gain insights from industry best practices, or they have just experienced an operational crisis they didn\u2019t see coming. With Furious, it\u2019s impossible to lose money without the tool alerting you beforehand!<\/i><\/p>\n Automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks is an effective way to save time and improve profitability.<\/p>\n By delegating processes like invoice reminder follow-ups, time overrun alerts on projects, prospect follow-up workflows, and leave approval, you free your team from tedious administrative tasks. These automations not only optimize workflow but also reduce human errors, enabling smoother and more efficient management of projects and resources.<\/p>\n Our advice:<\/strong><\/p>\n Use a specialized tool that automates time tracking, leave approvals, and schedule consolidation. This will allow teams to focus on higher-value tasks.<\/em><\/p>\n \t\t
\nWith good planning and project management<\/a>, you can anticipate the unexpected, optimize your resources and guarantee the profitability of your assignments.<\/p>\nHow can you extend your visibility to several months?<\/h2>\n
Step 1: Centralize project-related information<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/furious.digitz.dev\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/plan-de-charge-1024x510.png\")
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDiscover the features of Furious
\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\nDavy Tessier, CEO of Furious Squad<\/b><\/h3>\n
Step 2: Automate tasks to save time<\/h2>\n
Focus on the Wokine case<\/h3>\n