The R-word, it’s everywhere. From rising interest rates to layoffs, the recession is on everyone’s mind, especially those of us in business in the tech world.
As a business owner or senior executive, your eyes are set on how to spend as little as possible as you ride out the storm and wait for the economy to bounce back. Equally, doing nothing to attract new business, improve operations, or protect your company in a recession could damage it more.
In tough economic times, businesses that focus on long-term, sustainable growth are more likely to emerge stronger from the teeth of a recession. One way businesses are doing this is by spending on technology and software that helps to optimize processes, cuts costs, and boosts efficiency, team productivity, and agility.
Yes, you read that right—more spending. Investing in tech during a time like this could help your organization achieve recession-proof sustainable growth. In fact, Gartner Research estimates that worldwide IT spending will grow to $4.5 trillion in 2023, an increase of 2.4% from 2022. Organizations increasingly recognize investment in tech as a way to save money rather than as a cost center alone.
In the project management world, tech can help ensure stability and survival, or better yet, actual profitable growth for your business, even during an economic downturn. Let’s take a look at how.
How to Recession-proof your Business with Project Management Tech
As we nervously move through these times, many of us are looking at how we can make our businesses more resilient, weather the storm and perhaps even grow from it. As we’ve mentioned above, the answer to our prayers may lie in technology.
Not quite convinced? Check out these eight ways the right tech partner (like us—Mission Control) will help grow your business and remain profitable even when the going gets tough.
1. Improve internal efficiencies
As we’re seeing in the tech world at the moment, in hard times, most organizations tend to cut staff. While this may be necessary, a better long-term strategy may be to enhance your business’s internal capabilities by using reliable project management technology.
Modern technology, such as automation and AI, can help drive efficiency and productivity within your project management teams. These tools also allow you to stay abreast of every aspect of your project to ensure everything moves along smoothly without incurring unnecessary costs or delays.
How Mission Control can help you achieve this
Mission Control gives teams visibility into the entire project’s lifecycle—all in one place. With this clarity, you can automate repetitive tasks and remove inefficient workflows.
The PMO dashboard within our tool gives you a quick view of how well (or not) your projects are progressing. At the end of each project, you can use these metrics to analyze your delivery efficiency and assess whether or not you met your project goals. Additionally, you can track cost and performance metrics to give you the overall financial health of your project.
By analyzing project progress regularly, you’ll get better insights into what’s working and what’s not so you can make necessary changes moving forward.
2. Optimize communication and collaboration
For most project management teams, information is often stored in silos making collaboration difficult. Poor team communication and collaboration could lead to duplicate work, and a project may slow down due to a lack of information visibility.
Modern, easy-to-use project management software can enable better collaboration and communication across an organization. The tool centralizes everything thus, eradicating information silos, and helping your business save money, resources, and time across the board.
How Mission Control can help you achieve this
Mission Control enables project teams and stakeholders to collaborate on projects in real-time. Both internal and external project stakeholders can upload and access project documents and other files, add comments on tasks, and more—right within the tool.
Our built-in communication tool lets teams create tasks, attach files, and share links directly in a conversation. Improved collaboration enables teams to work together toward a common goal. This kind of centralized collaboration dramatically minimizes the chance of duplicate work, delays, and cost overruns and, in turn, increases the opportunity for successful project outcomes.
3. Consolidate systems to eliminate redundancies
Many organizations are guilty of using multiple tools to manage scheduling, resource allocation, task delivery, timesheets, billing, communication, and more.
The proliferation of tools makes it difficult for businesses to generate a consolidated and integrated view of a project. Additionally, running all these tools simultaneously opens up the team to errors, and of course, maintenance costs too can stack up quickly.
Before investing in more tech, start by doing a post-mortem on your current tools to see how well they’re still working for you. Identify redundancies, inefficiencies, and tools your team no longer uses. Then, consolidate systems that do the same thing and eliminate the unnecessary tools.
Doing this will reduce maintenance and support costs. Even more importantly, it will help improve data consistency and visibility.
How Mission Control can help you achieve this
Investing in an all-in-one project management tool like Mission Control can be cheaper than running multiple tools. Our software enables you to do all your project related tasks within a singular application.
You can plan your project, assign tasks and responsibilities, monitor project progress, submit timesheets, monitor and control spending, generate reports, communicate with team members, raise invoices, and more from one central place.
Our centralized application does away with the need for multiple tools— saving you time and money and also reducing complexity. We often see new customers consolidating the use of 3-4 applications into just one when they migrate to Mission Control.
4. Streamline your project management processes
The ultimate purpose of project management is to streamline projects for a better, much less chaotic experience for everyone involved. But how can you avoid chaos when you have so much to do—from planning to resourcing, scheduling, budgeting, monitoring performance, and reporting?
The solution is to implement a robust project management system that makes it easier for teams to launch and execute projects more efficiently and in less time. This efficiency will then snowball across the organization and help it grow without getting caught up in the day to day minutiae.
How Mission Control can help you achieve this
Mission Control can be a helpful tool to consolidate all your project activities into a central dashboard. Making use of Mission Control means smoother operations which in turn means, your teams become more agile and empowered to undertake a broader range of projects without becoming overwhelmed. Ultimately, more successful projects can lead to faster growth for the business.
5. Automate project tasks and focus on important work
When times are tough, you need to be able to do more with less. This is only possible if you simplify and streamline complex processes, automate manual tasks, and remove redundancies.
Without proper tech support, teams often spend so much time carrying out tedious and manual admin tasks. When armed with the right tool your team can automate many of these tasks—helping your projects move along faster.
By automating less critical admin tasks, project teams can stay focused on their deliverables. This single focus on efficiency ensures that every stakeholder spends more time doing productive work that keeps the wheels moving and leaves the repetitive, tedious work to the software.
How Mission Control can help you achieve this
Mission Control customers have experienced better, quicker project processes thanks to our automation solutions. Now they can handle more projects without having to increase their capacity.
Our tool has also seen customers improve employee retention by automating much of the mundane work. Customers report improved workflow visibility to manage peaks and troughs—and the associated staff stress levels.
Retaining your employees can save you millions at a time when every dollar counts. In fact, the Financial Services Skills Commission and PwC estimate that organizations can save £49,100 (over $61,000) per employee by retaining and reskilling staff rather than seeking and hiring a replacement.
6. Identify defects earlier in the development process
It’s not uncommon for a project to go off the tracks, especially when they’re complex or involve multiple stakeholders and teams. This affects timely delivery and leads to budget blowouts—a project manager’s worst nightmare, especially in tough economic times.
This makes it even more necessary to implement a project management solution that allows PMs to keep an eye on project progress and quickly notice and address defects as early as possible in the development process. Managing defects proactively not only improves the quality of your products but helps you stay on track with project budgets and timelines. It also encourages teams to consider quality at all stages of the project life cycle, resulting in the continuous improvement of your deliverables.
How Mission Control can help you achieve this
Mission Control offers you visibility into what’s going on in your projects through dashboards, charts, and detailed task views. With this visibility, you can monitor quality throughout a project’s lifecycle and avoid unnecessary delays
If you discover a defect during production, you can quickly log it into your risk log and implement measures to handle it before progressing to the next stage.
One of the most interesting insights we uncovered from our Total Economic Impact Report was that our customers, on average, were experiencing a 45% uplift in their operational efficiency – that’s close to the equivalent of doubling your capacity without having to add any new team members!
Amongst a raft of improvements customers noted the time required for consultants to complete timesheets and expenses had reduced from 4 to 2 hours per period and for project managers to reconcile and report project activities had reduced from 6 to 1 hour per period.
7. Improve billable utilization
To weather a recession, you obviously want to increase revenue. One of the surest ways to do so is by ensuring your resources spend most of their time on billable tasks. This requires clear visibility into billable and non-billable activities and ensuring all potentially billable activities are invoiced.
Monitoring your resource utilization data may be a tedious process if you’re doing it manually. However, implementing a good tool can help you automatically track your team’s performance while avoiding manual data entry and messy spreadsheets.
How Mission Control can help you achieve this
Mission Control users can easily monitor all project data, including where resources spend their time. Our tool offers easy-to-use timesheets that teams can use to track time spent on tasks.
These automated timesheets dramatically reduce the time required for teams to log hours and for project managers to reconcile and report project activities. This leaves managers and their teams more time to focus on billable activities.
Project managers can then use the timesheets to see a project’s progress and where the business generates revenue and incurs costs. With this information, they can have real-time insight into resource utilization and make better decisions regarding future resource allocation.
Our customers have reported a 5% increase in billable utilization due to:
- A reduction in time spent doing non-billable activities.
- Holding project stakeholders accountable to project budgets
- Having visibility of progress and where projects are generating revenue and incurring costs.
In our Total Economic Impact Report, four of the five businesses audited attributed to Mission Control a significant increase in billable utilization, with the average increase of 5 percentage points and a range of increases between 2 to 13 percentage points.
8. Automate timely invoicing and reporting
The amount of admin work required to invoice and generate reports manually directly impacts the profitability of your business—particularly as the overheads and complexity of the business increase.
What you need is automation. By automating financial administration (such as invoicing, accounts receivable and payable, and reconciliation), you’ll send your invoices more promptly and frequently and spend less time doing tedious financial tasks. This will help increase your cash flow, urge your clients to pay on time and reduce the time you spend chasing up outstanding invoices.
A good project management tool also allows you to automatically generate reports of the financial health of your project. This visibility will help determine whether a project is profitable or not.
How Mission Control can help you achieve this
With Mission Control you can automate your invoicing, and quickly generate financial reports. You can also use these reports to analyze the financial success (or failure) of past projects and take learnings from them into the future.
Use the project financials feature to automatically generate an invoice – monthly, fortnightly, or even weekly, depending on your project needs. If you have retainer clients, this feature will significantly reduce the time spent (and therefore the cost) to create and issue the same invoice every month.
Additionally, you can also set up automated reminders for team member timesheets.
Utilizing these tools and features has results in a 34% improvement in financial operational efficiency for our customer on average. Time required to close the monthly financial cycle and to invoice completed work reduced from 56 hours to 37 hours per month saving our customers on average US$15,994 per year.
One of the clients we spoke with for our Total Economic Impact report stated that it took his team 8 hours every two weeks to generate their invoices and now with Mission Control it only takes 15 mins – this is a 95% improvement.
As outlined in the Total Economic Impact summary below, on average, our clients can invoice five times more projects while taking only 10% of the time they used to take before they started using Mission Control.
Single Source of Truth
We speak with many customers who say adopting Mission Control has bought some order to the chaos. They’ve gone from a suite of disconnected apps, to a project management tool embedded in a CRM that gives the business cross functional visibility and workflow sophistication.
Mission Control is a Salesforce-native tool, so if your organization has (or is looking at) Salesforce, your Salesforce Administrator can self manage Mission Control, rather than need to learn a separate set of skills to manage an off platform project management tool – again, an important cost and time saver in a time we need to be leaner and meaner!
Getting Started
While belt-tightening is vital during times of economic uncertainty, investing in the right project management tech can actively help your business sail through a recession, as evidenced by research from McKinsey. The report shows that organizations that invested in innovation throughout the 2009 financial crisis performed better by more than 30% in the following three to five years.
Investing in robust project management software such as Mission Control can help your business unlock post-crisis growth. Our suite of features will next-level your project management, reduce costs and improve organizational efficiency.
Request a demo today to see how Mission Control can help recession-proof your business.
