Project Management: How to Go From 'I Don't Have That Info' to 'It's All Here'

Managing engineering and environmental projects is complex, there aren’t reliable tools to support your work. Here we present ideas and solutions to help you organize your tasks. As well as managing employees and contractors in multiple projects.

Common Problems Project Managers at Professional Firms Face

Managing engineering projects requires a huge amount of skill as you need to keep many plates spinning at once.

First, when beginning a project you need to create the proposal and scope, breaking the whole project into tasks with milestones.

Then you need to manage both employees and contractors. They need direction and clear communication to collaborate well and solve problems efficiently.

Their hours also need to be tracked accurately and linked back to the right phases to ensure that projects are following their timelines and they’re still within budget.

Managing all these aspects, often for several projects at once, demands a lot of time and attention. So if you don’t have clear, reliable data at your fingertips, you can quickly lose control of information, documentation, and the project as a whole.

The Chaos of Decentralization

When project documentation is spread across multiple systems in different versions, finding the correct information becomes difficult.

Many reports, analyses, and billing information are sent by emails in different chains that become confusing and hard to understand. Colleagues will also share hours worked and preliminary findings in communication software, like Teams. These documents also get lost in chats and finding the correct version can become a nightmare.

It can become confusing for the team as a whole when tasks are located in different places. For example, on the office whiteboard, it says one thing, but then in the main Excel sheet, the task is described differently. These confusions lead to tasks being delayed and not being done correctly.

Lastly, when information is scattered across email, Teams, physical folders, Excel documents, and document storage systems there will be miscommunication due to a lack of visibility. Since information isn’t easy to find or see, your team members could misunderstand tasks, deadlines, or who is in charge of what.

All these issues lead to some serious consequences, including:

• Wasted time: Employees and contractors will waste time searching for information, duplicating work, and fixing errors
• Missed deadlines: When there isn’t clear communication and coordination, deadlines are often not understood and therefore missed. 
• Frustrated team members: Your team can feel overwhelmed by the amount of work there is to do, so they disconnect or give up. 
• Increased project risk: When decisions aren’t communicated clearly, are based on incorrect data, or take too long, the project's success becomes at risk.

How to Stay Organized as a Project Manager: Tips to Manage Project Information

In this section, we have 5 tips to help you avoid chaos and run the best projects possible.

1. Have Clear Milestones
   When you’re planning a new project, you should break it into phases and executable tasks. Every phase should have clear milestones with deadlines to ensure that all employees and contractors are working towards the same goal.
2. Communicate Clearly
   Communicate consistently and clearly with your company’s stakeholders, your client, contractors, and your internal team. Communication will help your project stay on time and on budget. 
3. Weekly Check-ins
   To help communication and visibility, you should have a weekly meeting with your team to share task updates, issues, and talk about how the project is going. You should have similar meetings with stakeholders and clients. 
4. Ensure Clean Data
   You need to make sure that important files, such as bills, proposals, reports, and key contacts are correct and accessible in your central repository. If your data isn’t correct and up to date, mistakes will ensue. 
5. Use Purpose-built Project Management Software
   There are a lot of generic project management tools available but they don’t work well for the unique workflows of engineering firms. You need to look for software that was made for engineers and consultants, such as Aldoa!

How Aldoa’s Project Management Software Can Help Professional Firms Go From Chaos to Clarity

Aldoa was made for engineering and consulting firms to manage their projects with all of their unique processes in one place. We consolidate five key aspects of project management with one tool.

1 - Task Tracking

To improve project management, you can assign, track, and complete tasks in Aldoa. 

All tasks can be broken into project phases to help you see how your project is doing. Both employees and contractors can be included in the system to improve transparency and collaboration. 

To make communication easier, Aldoa also has a messaging feature and a team Wiki where all team members can add key documents, information, and notes for each project. 

As well as the project manager, employees, and contractors, you can also include company stakeholders in the system. All of these people can receive real-time notifications on the platform and email.

2 - Budgets and Estimates

Make your financial management better with Aldoa’s cost estimation and budgeting features.

You can make lump sum budgets in Aldoa, you can also track expenses and run reports for each budget. You can also create time & material (T&M) budgets broken down into labor, subcontractor spend, direct costs, and other fees. Aldoa provides pre-built templates to help you to do just that.

All budgets can also be broken down into phases and tasks.

3 - Time Tracking

Another key part of managing engineering projects is tracking your team’s hours. 

With Aldoa, time tracking is integrated with task tracking and invoicing so that hours are tracked against tasks that are completed within a project. This allows you to bill your clients when phases of projects are completed, with granular insights into the amount of time that is incurred to complete the task. 

Furthermore, time tracking within Aldoa integrates with the robust reporting suite to provide you with real-time data about your projects. As an example, you can view “work in progress” phases of projects which tell you what work has been completed but not billed. This helps with ensuring that you are sending invoices to clients when work has been completed, accelerating the time it takes for you to get paid for completed work.

4 - Invoices and Payments

Aldoa integrates with QuickBooks and other financial systems to enable you to bill clients smoothly. 

Using Aldoa you can create one-off branded invoices within the software. Send payment links for credit cards or ACH to accept payments easily. You can also create bulk invoices for different projects at once with just a few clicks.

Finally, you can view all outstanding invoices by project or client and run customizable reports to see revenue by client type and revenue by project type. 

5 - CRM

Aldoa also provides an integrated CRM so that you can manage all your contacts in one place. This system allows you to keep track of clients, subcontractors, and vendors and easily find the information you need about each of them. 

It’s helpful for firms to consolidate their contacts in one place, so that you can gain control of your book of business and discover opportunities for growth. Furthermore, once customers are entered into your Aldoa CRM, you can easily send emails with invoices directly to customers through Aldoa with a click of a button!

How Aldoa Transformed LSRP Consulting

New Jersey-based environmental consulting firm, LSRP Consulting LLC, was struggling with using Excel and legacy accounting software to manage financial tracking, accounting, and project management. 

LSRP Consulting found Aldoa, which stood out for its ability to adapt to their unique project-based workflow. 

After making the switch to Aldoa, the whole LSRP Consulting team can now focus their time on providing professional services to clients efficiently, on time, and within budget. 

“Switching from our previous platform to Aldoa’s software has been transformative. We save a minimum of 70% of our administrative time, which is tremendous.” - Robert Fry, P.G., LSRP.

Ready to Ditch the Chaos? See Aldoa in Action - Book a Demo Now!

Discover how Aldoa can fit in with your current processes and transform your engineering or consulting firm to be more effective, collaborative, and profitable. Schedule your demo today!