Did We Really Lose That 100K?

When your people and their time the very things you sell to your clients, and their demand and availability is constantly changing, it’s common to find some variances in what you expected vs what the data shows as your current reality. Usually this involves segmenting and comparing data like what was projected in the previous week compared to what was actually billed, and/or the forecast last week versus the forecast this week. Any differences that show up are called out as variances.

Variances are just one of many ways to truly know what’s going on in your business and your projects. You want to make sure your projections are matching reality, if you are missing out on mistakes or losses you need to know about, and, if there are any outliers—why. Past variances are usually fixable either because they were an honest mistake, or because you can retrospect on them and try to get better at what caused them. But overall, you want your variances to be avoidable things, not things that actually cause major losses and affect your organization’s health.

Finding the variance itself is actually the easier part of this puzzle—given that your reporting gives you the ability to compare your data sets. The hard part is finding out why they’re there—especially when everyone is operating on separate spreadsheets and systems. Maybe someone’s vacation didn’t get logged on a project, or they got moved elsewhere and the hours allocated got thrown off, a holiday wasn’t accounted for, or a project got pulled in by a few days…the list of possibilities goes on and on. You have to start sleuthing and try to track down what happened. Is that amount really gone? Did it move to another project? What happened? Why was there a variance between what you planned or projected and what you are looking at now?

An example: Maybe you’re responsible for an entire region. You have many people on your team, plus clients, projects, and multiple delivery leads and managers responsible for different pieces of your projects. So when you want to find out why your reporting is showing that a project is off by 50K? Well, you’re going to have to go around from person to person checking in and asking questions. Eventually you will find out what happened, but you’ve wasted a ton of time in the process. Is searching for the origins of your variances really the best use of your time? When you are chasing down why there’s a big loss on a project and you don't know where it’s from, you cut into the time you and your team has to do the things that drive real growth.

Tools + Cadence

To be able to quickly make sense of your variances without the Sherlock Holmes routine, you need the right tools and the right cadence. Here are some key things you can do to take the pain out of variance tracking:

• Use the right data management tools.

• Make sure the data you input into your tools is accurate.

• Ensure the right people have access to the data they’re responsible for.

• Have a cadence in place to go over the data and discuss any issues.

Ideally, you have one place where you manage all the data so you aren’t having to hunt down disparate data in multiple systems and spreadsheets. You need to be able to see your variances in a dashboard so you can look at a single source to also see exactly what changed and why.

With the right cadence and a system that gives all the information you need in one place, you can build it all into how you work. Then you can spend more time on propelling your business forward, solve problems and help clients rather than get bogged down fixing problems and chasing variances.