Written by Nils R. | Jul 14, 2021 7:00:00 AM
What is
Consultant Dashboard
? Individual Consultant Dashboards are considered personnel performance tools and are used by project leaders and consultants to enable easy monitoring of important metrics related to a consultant's services and clients. Some of the main functionality in this type of dashboard is that it enables the consulting manager or individual consultants to run the report by period and person(s). The report provides analysis from six different perspectives: 1) Monthly trend in client billing, 2) Monthly trend in non-reimbursable expenses benchmarked against the average, 3) Monthly trend showing individual PM utilization benchmarked against the average, 4) Percent of projects with red, yellow and green status, 5) Monthly trend in billable versus non-billable hours, and 6) Top 10 clients ranked by billing amount. You find an example of this type of dashboard below.
Purpose of
Consultant Dashboards Professional Services organizations use Consultant Dashboards to enable team leaders or individuals with a self-service view of important KPIs and trends related to consultants and their clients. When used as part of good business practices in PMO and Consulting departments, a company can improve its personnel performance discussions and revenue optimization, and it can reduce the chances that the success or challenges of individual consultant's are not clearly visible to themselves or manager to encourage tactical discussions.
Example of a
Consultant Dashboard Here is an example of a Consultant Dashboard with trends and benchmarking for billing and client KPIs. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="2560"]
Example of a Consultant Dashboard for Professional Services Companies[/caption] You can find hundreds of additional examples
here
Who Uses This Type of
Dashboard
? The typical users of this type of dashboard are: Service Leaders, Project Managers, Consultants.
Other Reports Often Used in Conjunction with
Consultant Dashboards Progressive PMO and Consulting departments sometimes use several different Consultant Dashboards, along with KPI dashboards, consultant billing reports, project detailed and summary reports, project forecast models, annual budget models and other management and control tools.
Where Does the Data for Analysis Originate From? The Actual (historical transactions) data typically comes from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems like: Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) Finance, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (D365 BC), Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics SL, Sage Intacct, Sage 100, Sage 300, Sage 500, Sage X3, SAP Business One, SAP ByDesign, Acumatica, Netsuite and others. In analyses where budgets or forecasts are used, the planning data most often originates from in-house Excel spreadsheet models or from professional corporate performance management (CPM/EPM) solutions.
What Tools are Typically used for Reporting, Planning and Dashboards? Examples of business software used with the data and ERPs mentioned above are:
- Native ERP report writers and query tools
- Spreadsheets (for example Microsoft Excel)
- Corporate Performance Management (CPM) tools (for example Solver)
- Dashboards (for example Microsoft Power BI and Tableau)
Corporate Performance Management (CPM) Cloud Solutions and More Examples
