Archive for Business Efficiency

TOP Step Consulting Announces A New Service To Gain Insight Into Business Operations Quickly And More Efficiently

11.02.2010– TOP Step Consulting LLC announced the release of the Reporting Foundation Package for OpenAir that will provide a quicker more effective approach to creating critical and commonly used OpenAir reports for Professional Services business operations.

TOP Step Consulting provides services to global and industry leading businesses who run their project based business using OpenAir. Their extensive experience has led to the accumulation of a knowledge library for critical and commonly used OpenAir reports which provide information to manage and improve business operations.

The Reporting Foundation Package for OpenAir provides the accumulated knowledge and experience to customers by providing customized setup and user guides for each report within the report library. TOP Step Consulting delivers the report library together with a day of consulting to review the reports, answer questions, and customize the guidebooks to align with the unique operational needs of the business. The library of reports includes Financial Reports, Project Delivery Reports and Resource Management Reports.

By implementing the Report Foundation Package for OpenAir clients can more quickly create and begin using reports and dashboards to get insight into their critical business operations to better manage their businesses. “We are very excited to be providing this new service to our customers. With our new service offering we are now able to offer clients the benefit of our accumulated knowledge to more quickly gain the return on investment of automating their business operations with tools like OpenAir.” says Jodi Cicci, President and CEO of TOP Step. “It’s all about providing greater value to our customers. We are continually reviewing the services we provide to our customers and ways we can pass our experience onto our clients to help them be more successful.”

See online news release here

Reporting Workshop

Friday, September 17th, 2010

Do you have the information you need to make proactive decisions?

TOP Step understands you need to see the right information in order to take action. Our Reporting Workshop is a collection of critical and most commonly used OpenAir Reports. By using our Reporting Workshop you can more quickly begin getting visibility into your operational data. We provide a step by step user guide for each report customized to your unique business model. The Reporting Workshop is delivered along with a day of consulting to assist in the setup and answer any questions you may have.

Currently the reports we provide as a part of this workshop are:

  • Financial Reports
    • Forecasting
    • Average Bill Rate
    • Fiscal Year Financial Performance vs. Budget Plan
    • Work-in-Progress & Deferred Revenue
    • Strategic Revenue Analysis
  • Project Delivery Reports
    • Project Margin
    • Project Performance (budget management)
  • Resource Management Reports
    • Utilization
    • Capacity Planning
    • Timesheet Compliance

How To Lower Your Cost of PSA Tool Administration

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

If you could lower your Professional Services Automation Tool administrative cost, would you do it?  This paper will introduce you to best practices to improve your systems administration, lower your costs, and provide a greater ROI on your PSA tool.

Download White Paper

Business Operations Model

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Not sure where to start? Start with what you already know…your business.

The best way to start streamlining your business is to view what is in place. We will walk through your current operations with your team to identify key processes, key resources, and dependencies in place.   This service is recommended for executives and managers looking for that high-level snap shot of their business operations into a concise documented format.   This will provide an easy way to prioritize and focus on the areas that will provide the greatest benefit to your operations.

  • Ideal for constrained budgets who need insight into their operations
  • A quick first step toward improving your business operations
  • Provides you with information by which to make decisions on areas of improvement that will provide the greatest benefit to your business operations

Business Efficiency Assessment

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Do you know what is preventing your progress towards business operations excellence?

We conduct complete assessments of your services business and how it utilizes systems and processes to identify areas for improving your system or process.  We work closely with your team to fully understand your operational model, what processes and tools are in place and how effective they are.  At the end of this short 2 week engagement, we provide you with recommended process and tools improvements along with the cost/benefit for implementing each change.

1.  Process Workshop  -  We capture how the daily business operations is currently managed, understand the improvements or changes you plan to make and any known issues impacting your operational.

2.  Operational Analysis -  We identify process changes which will be required to meet the business efficiency goals, review automation opportunities and create a matrix which can be used for tools selection and system changes, and calculate cost/benefit for implementation of identified changes  providing critical data for implementation decisions and budget for the project.

3.  Business Efficiency Plan and Recommendations – The result is a full Before and After deliverable with an actionable plan on process/system changes and training that is designed to improve your business operations model.

Project Management Office

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Are you achieving your profitability targets? Are You Achieving High Customer Satisfaction Rates?

A discipline of repeatable project delivery will not only impact your profit margin but also improve the quality of project delivery.   Most organizations have project management skills, but lack process within the organization to achieve consistent repeatable process which effects your bottom line, reputation, stability and growth as a professional services organization.  We focus on the execution of your project management process and what is needed so you can execute on those large, riskier projects with confidence!

Process Modeling Workshop

Along with your Senior Management and Project team we focus on how you execute your engagements and where the areas of opportunity exist before we recommend foundation elements.  The results of the Process Workshop is an outline of the PMO Foundation to be developed or improved including:

  • PMO Mission/Charter
  • Measurable Objectives
  • Stakeholders
  • Communication plan including document repository
  • Complete lifecycle process diagram with decision, actions, and deliverable identified
  • Process definition templates
  • Tool usage

Process Standards and Measurable Objective Development

With your project team we define the standard process, the detailed steps to be followed within the process, and standard project templates to be included in the PMO library.  Measurable objectives for PMO reporting are then refined to align with checkpoints, triggers, or actions identified in various processes impacting engagement status, health, and risk.

Training

Development of project manager training is critical to the communication, and success for execution by your project managers. Materials are customized to your specific PMO structure to provide control and flexibility where needed to ensure high adoption by your team.

PMO Launch and Governance

The PMO is launched with an initial baseline of performance metrics for measuring overall project performance.  To realize the benefits of a PMO for improving your bottom line, a continued process monitoring is designed to audit the trends in how the PMO is impacting the overall delivery success of projects such as reducing financial risk, identifying problematic projects early.

Empathy Lab

Saturday, May 29th, 2010

“Because TOP Step’s methodology focused on our business process first to understand how we would most benefit from a best in class PSA tool,  we were able to accelerate our original schedule to deploy the OpenAir system to meet our specific business needs.  Within one month we had a system in place that was contributing value to our business operations for Empathy Labs with accurate and readily available information.   TOP Step’s expertise in professional services business automation was key to a successful implementation, and they will continue to be a trusted business partner for providing sound advice as we expand our OpenAir system usage.”

- Howard Abrams,  Empathy Labs