Definitions of Key Project-Related PS Enterprise Metrics (2 of 3)

Alan Birchenough

How does PS Enterprise help us measure all Project-related activity? Let's look at some definitions and examples as we work our way down the value chain.

Starting at the top of the chain, we need visibility into those Opportunities that are likely to become Projects, and the value of those Opportunities in Professional Services terms. PS Enterprise extends pipeline reporting out of salesforce.com Sales Force Automation (SFA) by letting us flag some Products on Opportunities as PS Products. We can then measure the value of services Opportunities by reporting on the total value of the Opportunity Product lines marked with "Is Services Product". This is called "Services Attached from Products" expressed in currency, and has a corresponding percentage, which is figured by the percentage ratio of services attached value to total opportunity value. Sometimes PS people loosely refer to the percentage as the "attach rate", and it measures how good the Sales and Pre-Sales teams are at selling services "on the back of" product sales.

Example: An opportunity has four Products on it, Product A at $100,000 and Product B at $87,000, plus Service Offering 1 valued at $15,000, plus Service Offering 2 valued at $7,000. Then “Services Attached from Products” = $22,000 and “Services Attached % From Products” = approximately 10.5%.

Once the Sales Executive and the Pre-Sales team have done their stuff, and a services Opportunity is at a high enough probability to trigger creation of a Project record, we can set up a Budget on that project. This budget figure, initially carried down from the Opportunity, is provisional until a Statement of Work is signed and any other paperwork is completed, at which point it becomes definitive. In PS Enterprise, the total of all budget lines of type "Customer Purchase Order”" and "Customer Purchase Order Change Request" on a project is called "Bookings" for the Project.

Example: An existing Project has a budget line of $100,000 of type "Customer Purchase Order", and a later one of type "Customer Purchase Order Change Request" for $30,000. Hence "Bookings" for the Project = $130,000.

There are other types of Budget lines available, such as "Internal" (which is set aside for non-customer-facing work), totalled to create the "Internal Budget" for a project, and there is also a separate "Expense Amount" field on each Budget line, which is totalled to figure an "Expense Budget" at the higher levels (Project and above).

As Project execution moves forward, "Assignments spawn Timecards". In real-world terms, our assigned resources will work and report time spent on labor, and PS Enterprise will tally for us, at the project level, the number of Billable and Non-Billable hours reported on Approved Timecards, as worked both by internal (staff) resources and external resources, i.e., subcontractors. In PS Enterprise, these hours are presented at the project level as "Time Actuals".

Similarly, "Assignments spawn Expenses". In other words, assigned resources incur Expenses, some of which are reimbursable. Reimbursements drive project costs. These actuals are shown as Expense Costs in PS Enterprise.