Prevent Budget Disasters Before They Happen

1. Introduction (0:00 – 0:13)
Hi everyone! This is Yanick for another ‘How I Solved It With Klient’. In this episode, we’re going to be looking at how we can prevent budget disaster before it happens.

2. Importance of Budget Control (0:14 – 0:35)
So as a project manager, I don’t want to go over budget. Budget is precious. I want to keep it in my project. I want to be notified and alarmed if ever I’m going to go over budget and if it’s the case, I want to be able to easily dig in and find the root cause. And at that point, I want to be able to stop everything or course correct, so I can deliver my project successfully.

3. Introduction to Klient (0:36 – 0:50)
So with this in mind, let’s go see it in Klient.

4. Daily Routine of a Project Manager (0:51 – 1:10)
So as a Project Manager, at the beginning of my day, after looking at my release note in Klient, I would go in my ‘Global Workspace’ where I would see a detailed list of my projects with the different attributes and surprise, surprise here! We do have some red showing. It wasn’t the case yesterday.

5. Identifying At-Risk Projects (1:11 – 1:30)
So, we have this project that has become at risk and we definitely need to take care of it. As a Project Manager, I want to be able to simply investigate.

6. Investigating the Problem (1:31 – 2:00)
So let me go in my Workspace, switch my preset to another set of columns where I’m going to be able to see in detail that this is the main problem we have, the design phase of this project, where we had 29 hours estimated, 21 hours have been logged so far, and only 25% has been completed. And we can see with this specific field, and this is the key here, is that 84 hours is estimated at completion if we keep this course.

7. Course Correcting the Project (2:01 – 2:50)
So as a good Project Manager, I want to be able to go in and course correct like we said. So let me open up that specific task and go see its details of what it entails. So a design task could always be tricky. In this case, we’re building a customer community page for our customer. So, there’s a design that’s been proposed. We can see the team, you have myself and also have Jim and Ben Gray, my Developer and our Business Analyst. And this is the main problem here is that if we stay on course at 25% complete, with that number of hours logged and the estimation, we’re going to end up at 84 hours. So this is unacceptable.

8. Resolving the Issue (2:51 – 3:30)
So let me go in and see more of the details. On the left side, I can see my checklist, where only one out of four items, for 25%, has been complete. So we need to tackle the other tasks if we want to get unblocked and unstuck. And we can really go in the details here and because everything lives under one roof, one roof, one system, all that communication is also following and we can see that there’s been a lot of communication between the Developer and the Business Analyst not agreeing on the design. This happens quite often. This is how you go over budget.

9. Making the Final Decision (3:31 – 4:00)
So now I can simply and easily stop this madness and say ‘I got it, first design is good enough!’ and then communicating with my team, we can unstuck this task and I’ll handle Jim and the way he handled this task in his one-on-one. But now I can come back here in my checklist, define that the ‘Develop design’ is good. As a Project Manager, I do approve that design. And just like that my task is now completed.

10. Conclusion (4:01 – 4:18)
And then the number of hours… I’ve ended up at 21 hours. So we are even under budget because I’ve been able to see and interact very rapidly with my team to prevent that budget overrun. So at the end, with Klient as a Project Manager, I never go over budget because I always find out before it happens and I can then course correct effectively. So with this, I say thank you and see you in another episode!