Where it started, and what wasn't working.
Every Monday, senior staff spent the first part of the week pulling numbers from project management, time tracking and billing tools that didn't talk to each other, and stitching the result into a weekly report. The numbers were accurate — eventually — but the cost of producing them was paid in lost billable hours.
We unified the existing project management, time tracking and billing systems into a single operational layer. Definitions for utilization, margin and pipeline are agreed once and applied everywhere; the weekly report now assembles itself overnight.
Where the friction actually lived.
- Project management, time tracking and billing tools running independently of each other.
- Senior consultants assembling Monday reports by hand from three sources every week.
- Different definitions of utilization and margin across departments — every meeting started with a reconciliation.
- Numbers always one week old by the time leadership saw them.
- No way to roll partial-period data into a forward view without manual work.
What we did about it.
We didn't replace the tools the consultants already used. We connected them — and put one definition of every metric in the layer above.
The work the team was already doing didn't change. The friction around proving it did.