Overview
As part of our ongoing quest to make Parallax better, today we're launching several anticipated updates to our Insights reporting platform. These changes are designed to arm you with more visibility into the areas that need your attention the most, all in service of strengthening your forecasts.
From small tweaks to big changes, keep reading below to see how we’ve updated variance management across our utilization and project reports, brought together disparate views into health of your project portfolio, and also launched a brand new report for forecasting hiring!
| Project Health |
We've overhauled our views into the health of your portfolio with the Project Health Overview and Project Health by Period reports. These reports will be your go-to when looking to see overall project performance against budget, and for spotting period-to-period variances in actuals to planned. |
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Our new Hiring Forecast report is a great new tool for identifying when to hire so that you're not over or understaffing based solely on what's happening today. This report augments the capacity picture across your active projects and layers in your pipeline with the ability to include / exclude opportunities, active projects, and people from your forecast. |
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| Utilization > Overview |
We've enhanced our primary Utilization report to provide better visibility into the variances you leverage to strengthen your forecasts. We're now able to compare our plans and actuals against not just our capacity, but target utilization as well. Also, why not a name change?? What was once Advanced, is now the Overview. |
| Revenue > Margin |
We've introduced some new variables for segmenting data in our existing Margin report to make it easier for diagnosing margin performance over time. |
Project Health
Project Health Overview
The Project Health Overview report is now the place where you can see how each individual Project is forecasted to finish. This allows you to address things like margin and budget issues before it’s too late. By regularly reviewing these forecasts against the budgets that were originally sold, then adjusting the resource needs of projects accordingly, you can continue to pivot as you navigate projects through to completion.
Check out this Article for more info on Project Health Overview!
Project Health by Period
We’ve taken the By Project tab on the original Utilization report and turned it into its own thing. Now you're able to address not only hours variances, but also revenue variances week to week on your projects to further dial in your forecasting.
Simply review the past week and analyze the variance between actuals and what was planned, then address any variances greater than 5%. Is this a single week anomaly or a several week trend? Use these variances to direct your attention to the places that need it most.
Check out this Article for more info on Project Health by Period!
Hiring Forecast
We’re really excited to be releasing the all-new Hiring Forecast as a part of the Insights package! This report takes the opportunities that are currently in your Pipeline and combines them with the Active Project resource plans, in order to provide heatmaps indicating where you might be running into a hiring problem that needs to be addressed.
You can use the Hiring Forecast to build out scenarios using different resources, projects and Pipeline opportunities in order to see how different factors affect your forecast. This allows you to chart and navigate the right course towards the best and most informed hiring decisions!
Check out this Article for more info on the Resourcing > Hiring Forecast!
Utilization > Overview
The Utilization reporting in Parallax is one of the strongest feedback mechanisms you have for validating the integrity of your resource forecast. We accomplish this through the surfacing and reconciliation of the variances between what we planned and what actually happened.
This release doubles down on that concept by directly calling out those variances so you can quickly turn your attention to the areas that need it most.
We've also taken this opportunity to bring the separate variables for Billable Capacity and Target Utilization to the forefront. By bringing both concepts into the same view we hope to drive more clarity into the differences between what capacity your team has to deliver work, and the goal you've set for utilization.
This change helps you to not just identify instances where Target Utilization goals are being missed (or exceeded) - but also helps you identify if that's because plans were low, or because the actuals recorded were different from what was planned.
We've done a lot to this key report and to see it all in more detail, check out this article!
Revenue > Margin
The Margin report now highlights trends in your profitability across departments, roles, offerings, clients, employees, and projects. A monthly review of how your margin performed in the last month is an important part of catching issues before they become big problems for the organization.
In an effort to strengthen that look into performance, we've introduced new periods to explore data (weeks, months, quarters, years) and added an Average Bill Rate column to help diagnose potential margin issues.
You can learn more about the Revenue > Margin report by checking out this article!
Questions
If you are running into any challenges adjusting to these updates, or would like some additional guidance on how best to make use of the reporting package inside of Parallax, just reach out to your CSM!