Project Management Best Practices for Environmental Consulting Professionals

At Aldoa, we know how important effective project management is for environmental consulting firms to deliver high-quality projects on time and within budget. Regulations can be complex, but your systems for managing them don’t have to be. 

Let us explore the most common challenges and provide our tips for overcoming them.

5 Common Challenges in Environmental Consulting Projects

We talk to thousands of environmental consulting businesses across the country, and many face similar issues. If you’re reading this, understand that you’re not alone. 

Until now, there hasn’t been an easy-to-use software solution designed specifically for the unique workflows of environmental consulting firms.

Here are some of the most common challenges that we hear:

1. Managing projects, timesheets, and financials across multiple systems.
2. Building detailed budgets for short-term and long-term projects using time and materials and lump-sum cost structures.
3. Tracking employee time and subcontractor expenses by project, phase, and task.
4. Understanding if ongoing projects will be completed on time and within budget.
5. Creating and sending custom invoices to clients when work is completed.

The Importance of Effective Project Management

A good project management software will combine all your fragmented systems into one solution. It will be user-friendly so your team can start using it immediately. Time is money, and a steep learning curve can distract your team from doing the real job at hand.  

The ideal project management software will support your entire team, and help you focus on delivering quality work on time and within budget. 

Below, we share 5 tips to help you on your way to better project management.

5 Project Management Tips for Environmental Consulting Firms

1. Maintain a Clean Database

Keep an organized & comprehensive database of all your contacts, including customers, employees, subcontractors, and other vendors. 

By using a CRM or an integrated solution like Aldoa, you can track your interactions with each contact to determine the best times to reach out to prospective clients or customers.

Plus, if your financial data is stored in the same system as your contacts, it’s easy to run reports to see revenue by client or end-market, amount paid to a specific subcontractor over the year, and much more. 

2. Break Down Projects by Phases and Tasks

Environmental consulting projects might begin with a simple scope of work, but can evolve into much more complex undertakings. What starts as a simple due diligence project with preliminary sampling may lead you to discover widespread soil or groundwater contamination!

Create phases for each project and break down the work associated with each phase by individual task to help manage the dynamic nature of the projects.

Not only does this help your team track financial performance across different tasks, but your clients will also appreciate clearly delineating what you’re billing them for. 

3. Assign & Track Employee Workload

Every environmental consulting business owner wants their employees to be as billable as possible, but how can you ensure that your team is being efficient if you don’t plan & track their capacity? 

Schedule out as much project work as possible, and make sure you plan everything well in advance. The easiest way to maximize utilization rates is by ensuring your employees have enough work for the upcoming week.

By closely monitoring upcoming capacity, you’ll also know when you have the bandwidth to take on new projects, allowing the business to grow and get the most out of the finite resources you have. Systems like Aldoa have resource management and capacity planning tools that are perfect for maximizing revenue, even with a small team. 

4. Implement Methods for Collaboration & Real-Time Information

Ensure that your team is aligned by using shared notes, global document storage, and real-time communication methods. This helps every team member have all the information they need, and also allows you to address questions in real time to keep projects moving forward. 

Purpose-built project management software like Aldoa integrates these communication and data storage tools within one single platform. It’s every project manager’s nightmare to get a late-afternoon call from a client, frantically searching through scattered folders for that Excel document that has the latest budget updates.

What makes matters worse is getting off the phone, only to realize that the running list of costs for that project hasn’t been updated in three weeks. Tools like Aldoa ensure that all of your data is a click or two away, and that all of your project information is always up-to-date. 

5. Analyze Your Successes and Failures to Make Better-Informed Decisions

During the life of a project, your team collects a ton of data. Whether it’s cost estimates, client invoice preferences, or subcontractor pricing changes, this data is critical to evaluating your performance and understanding why you were successful or not on any given project.

With all-in-one solutions like Aldoa, your historical data can be used to make better-informed decisions for future projects. Having all of your data in one place allows you to run reports and learn from your mistakes.

Next time you’re creating a proposal for a similar scope of work you’ve delivered on in the past, systems like Aldoa will help you more accurately create cost estimates and ensure that every project is as profitable as possible. 

Utilize Specialized Tools and Software Build for Environmental Consulting Firms

Environmental consulting projects can range from short-term to long-term, evolve in scope, and involve multiple parties working on them simultaneously. Performing a Phase I Environmental Site Assessment is dramatically different from managing a long-term soil remediation project.

Having a clear process for every type of project ensures that your team communicates effectively, completes quality work, and delivers the best possible results to your clients. 

Implementing the right tools, software, and processes will help alleviate common operational challenges that are unique to your environmental consulting business.

Transform Your Project Management with Aldoa – Book a Demo Today!

A dedicated project management software like Aldoa can help your team stay organized with tools specifically designed for your profession. We understand the importance of your work and the challenges you face in managing projects, maximizing resources, and conveying ever-changing information to clients. 

Our goal is to provide software that makes your life easier so you can focus more on what matters most: completing quality projects on time and within budget.

Schedule a personalized demo today with our team to see how Aldoa can support your environmental consulting firm.