Our article “You are underwater and yet your fixed-price project is not cost-effective?” gave you some tips on how to optimise your profitability.
Today we are going to help you adopt the best practices of fixed price project management.
To run a fixed price project, you must manage:
- the budget
- the scope
- The planning
One of the three points can be adjusted but never to the detriment of the other parameters. This implicit law is well known to experienced project managers. This implicit law is well known to experienced project managers.
So far so good
But behind the theory lies a hard practice: the assessment of budget, scope and planning in a dynamic way as the project progresses.
In general, this is where it starts to get stuck.
You will need to avoid getting bogged down in endless management committee meetings, which as such can account for almost half of the sold time of some projects…
What are the best practices in fixed price project management?
We’ll share our tips with you.
Fixed price project management: the right questions to ask
First of all, are you able to answer these few questions about the last projects you have carried out (if you answer “yes” to all the questions then you are a MASTER PROJECT LEADER AMBASSADOR WARRIOR).
- Is the scope clear? Have you detailed everything that needs to be done and can you put a time frame to each item?
- Is this first scope vs time to spend document shared with the client?
- Is it shared with the one who is going to have to do it 🙂 🙂
- Have you integrated everything into a planning?
- Does it fit into the planning of the person who will be doing it?
So far you have escaped the tradevs. production war #bravo
- Have you identified potential purchases for the project? Have you made provision for them? In other words: do you have a written gross margin target for your project?
- Do you share weekly progress reports with your client?
- Do you know in real time what you still have to do on the project?
- Does your client know this every week?
- Do you review the end date of the schedule weekly?
- Did you charge the equivalent of what you produced?
- Are you able to know in real time the time spent on the project vs. the time sold? D’ailleurs voici les meilleures façons de suivre le temps passé sur un projet au forfait
- Do you survey your client’s satisfaction during the project in a quantifiable and measurable way?
- Do you know how much you have produced on the project? We recommend that you (re)read our article on the advantages of tracking your activity by progress rather than by invoicing
- For all these monitorings and follow-ups, did you spend less than 20% of the sold time of the project?
Furious automates monitoring and follow-up… and saves your time!
With Furious, all these questions are answered automatically and without any extra work!
You monitor the main criteria in real time:
- load (time spent vs. sold)
- planning (what I told to my client)
- progress (where I have reached actually)
- Billing ( where am I at)
The challenge for you is to always be aligned with these 4 criteria and to share them with your client weekly. This enables you to anticipate any possible readjustment of the schedule / scope or budget 😉
So shall we give you a demo? Discover Furious for free.
