Every consulting company has its unique challenges in the service industry. However, successfully managing projects is a common challenge for every consulting firm.
The following project challenges are common to many consulting companies. Awareness and understanding of the implications can help your business overcome these challenges and be more successful.
In this blog, we’ll give you possible solutions on how to better overcome these challenges. Be excited about it.
1. Complexity of projects
Consulting firms face an increasingly complex, global environment in which they must continue to provide the best advice. The global nature of the industry exacerbates the problem as firms handle more and more projects overseas and, in many cases, work with subcontractors, partner firms, and/or independent contractors. Additionally, customer demands have increased in recent years.
The challenge is to complete a project faster, more efficiently, and on tighter budgets while meeting the needs of the customer.
Create the technical conditions for today’s challenges
As a consultancy, your primary focus should therefore be on using today’s technical capabilities to create a digital work environment that maps lean and automated processes and can adapt to your needs and those of your clients.
In our opinion, the Microsoft365 work environment is a great place to do this.
2. Meeting deadlines
The ability to meet deadlines is critical in the fast-paced digital age. The pressure at work and in daily life is unavoidable.
Those who can keep their cool in high-pressure situations give themselves a stronger competitive position. Global consulting firms operate under strict deadlines from the initial agreement to the project and its deliverables. A consultant must be ready to respond to a client’s needs as quickly as possible.
We have summarized for you in this blog article 5 ways that will help you meet your deadlines and even complete projects sooner.
3. Book working hours correctly on different projects
The job of consultants is to analyze situations, start projects and share their knowledge, not to write expense reports or fill out timesheets. Nevertheless, recording working hours is crucial for the successful implementation of projects! The demands of clients on project members are getting higher and higher as well as the demand for transparent project documentation.
Some consultants even distrust time recording and regard it as a control instrument. However, if you use it correctly, time tracking gives you a clear overview of what you and your team have done and for whom. In turn, clients get that bit of transparency that can make all the difference.
How can consultants track their time easily, efficiently, and accurately without feeling like they’re being monitored?
Automated, fast, and easy to use – timeghost project time tracking
Our project time tracking solution timeghost offers great automation possibilities in time tracking as well as close connections to other programs via the Microsoft Graph API and various connectors e.g. from Zapier (over 5000 connectors). We help you to integrate timeghost into your working environment in the best possible way and to create individual workflows. Just contact us at [email protected].
This is how easy and fast you track your working hours in timeghost
For example, when you have a conversation with your work colleagues in teams, the duration of the conversation is recorded in the background and automatically entered in the software.
The only thing you have to do after the conversation is to assign the conversation to the corresponding project task. With the timer and our AI assistant, you can assign your working hours to projects easily, quickly, and intuitively.
timeghost connects to your Microsoft365 programs
In addition to working closely with Microsoft Teams, you can use the software to connect with Microsoft365 programs that are relevant to you. This is mainly about exchanging data to make recording your working hours even easier. For example, if you use Microsoft Planner and create a new task, our software will automatically display an event with the corresponding task.
On the screenshot, you can see several M365 programs from which timeghost automatically captures events that you can enter directly as working time in the app.
At timeghost, we call this “Feed your Feed”. To use this feature effectively, we’ve developed a dedicated section that displays all the data from the programs you use.
4. Meeting high customer expectations
Consulting leaders consistently find the now-high client expectations to be their greatest business pressure. If you ask your company’s consultants with years of experience what has changed in recent years, they will say that today’s clients expect faster responses, shorter deadlines, and better results. At the same time, consulting fees are not necessarily higher, but they are more closely tied to results.
Every part of the changing business landscape leads to a change in customer expectations. That’s only natural. The good news for consultants is that it is within their power to rise to the occasion. For example, many leading advisors have recognized that they need to expand or adapt their service offerings to meet their clients’ needs.
General tips on how consulting firms will continue to be successful in the future include:
1. Stay lean
This may be difficult depending on your experience. However, if you were part of a consulting group that had to close its doors and turn out the lights, you probably already understand the importance of staying lean. Keep your team as a small group of energetic directors and then hire highly specialized specialists according to the needs of each project.
2. Emphasize results and deliverables
In the future, successful consultants will emphasize results over daily work, day rates, or hourly rates. Your path forward depends on whether you can point to obstacles overcome, problems solved, or innovative solutions implemented.
Of course, you should still pay attention to tracked work hours, because they count. With our software, documenting your tasks in the appropriate projects will automatically show your results.
3. Invest in the right tools
Building your team of clients, specialists, contractors, and freelancers is the starting point.
What benefits do shared technologies bring you?
- Creates better collaboration through streamlined workflow management (e.g., Microsoft365)
- Facilitates relationships with your clients
- Is aligned so that technology can adapt to the specific business model or focus of your projects
With the right mindset and tools, you’ll be well equipped as a successful consultant to meet the challenges of the modern business landscape.
Try timeghost during the 14 days free trial or book a live demo, where we will show you the application and answer any questions you may have regarding our tool!
We are looking forward to seeing you!
In this article, you will see a quick guide on how you can use the software in your company or team in just a few minutes.
Recommend our software – with the timeghost Partner Program
We have recently released the timeghost Partner Program! It allows authorized companies to distribute and introduce the software to companies that need a project time tracking solution integrated into the M365 working environment.
You can find more information regarding application, commission and other conditions on our partner website.
If you want to get more information about our model, please contact our support.
Get the timeghost Teams App
You only need to install the timeghost Teams App directly from the AppSource Store in the application. You can find a manual on how to do this right here. The app includes all features that you know from the web client and since you use your Office 365 account to access the software you’re set and done in only a few seconds.
