Project Management Software for Environmental Consulting Firms

Missing project deadlines? Employees and subcontractors putting your budgets at risk by spending too much time & money to complete their work? Relying on separate systems to manage project schedules, timesheets, and cost estimates?

You are not alone in experiencing these problems. From small to large firms, the challenges of managing people and resources remain the same. We think it’s time for a more efficient and streamlined way to take charge of your projects so you can spend more time on what matters most: delivering quality work to your clients.

Introducing Aldoa’s project management software - purpose-built for environmental consulting firms. From project tracking to task management and capacity planning, Aldoa is designed with all the tools you need to successfully manage environmental projects in one easy-to-use platform.

Why Environmental Consulting Firms Need Specialized Project Management Software

Environmental consulting firms face distinct challenges. From tracking regulatory requirements to managing projects that vary greatly in duration and complexity, traditional project management tools often fall short.

Existing solutions just aren’t built for the unique nature of your work, and trying to build in-house systems is time-consuming and prohibitively expensive.

Managing environmental projects using just Excel isn’t any better. It’s nearly impossible to monitor deadlines, track multiple projects at once, and gather real-time insights on project performance when all of your data is trapped in static, siloed spreadsheets. 

Here’s why a tailored solution like Aldoa is essential.

Diverse Project Scope

Environmental consulting projects can range from a two-week-turnaround Phase 1 Environmental Site Assessment (ESA) to a long-term remediation effort lasting months or even years. Given the exploratory nature of the job, you can also never be sure of what you’ll find until you start investigating.

A simple due diligence project can turn into a year-long cleanup if you find unexpected soil contamination from a leaky Underground Storage Tank (UST). The unpredictable and ever-changing nature of environmental consulting projects requires a flexible and robust system to effectively manage dynamic tasks, finite resources, and sensitive deadlines.

Regulatory Compliance

Staying in compliance with state, local, and federal regulations is a fundamental tenet of the environmental consulting profession. Consultants have to constantly collect data, perform analyses, and build client-facing reports that adhere to various agency requirements.

What makes matters worse is that these regulations and requirements are constantly changing. PFAS weren’t the first emerging contaminant, and they won’t be the last. ASTM E1527-21 fundamentally changed the way consultants perform Phase I ESAs, but these new-and-improved standards are likely to change again in 8 years.

An ever-changing regulatory landscape makes your work incredibly challenging, as your team needs to keep track of dynamic requirements and re-evaluate proven methods of success. Solutions that worked in the past may now fall short when assessed under different guidelines. 

As regulations evolve and the environmental landscape becomes more complex, the need for a reliable system to manage & track compliance requirements becomes even more important.

Finite Resource Management

Environmental firms have several resources at their disposal in order to complete projects. Regardless of if you’re doing everything in-house with your employees and company-owned equipment, or relying on subcontractors and third-party vendors for specialized services like laboratory testing and excavation, it’s a lot to manage.

The effective planning, utilization, and management of finite resources is critical to ensure that your projects remain on-time and profitable. 

The benefits of effectively managing your internal resources aren’t limited to reducing costs and delivering projects on time. The best project managers understand that if they can accurately and efficiently schedule out upcoming workloads, this puts consulting business owners in the position to know when they have the bandwidth to take on new projects.

Unlike other stagnant industries, the environmental market is booming, and there’s plenty of additional work to win. Leveraging tools that maximize finite resources lets you focus on growing the business.  

Tracking the capacity of your employees increases profitability and speeds up the completion of projects, but most consultants overlook the fact that effective workload management also has a direct impact on revenue.

Communication and Collaboration

Successful environmental consulting projects depend on clear communication and collaboration among team members, clients, and stakeholders. An innocuous Environmental Desktop Review can quickly turn into something bigger, so it’s critical to have the right tools in place that let you organize your findings and conclusions in a clear, concise manner. 

It can be difficult to tell your client why the scope or budget for a project is increasing, but as you already know, these nuanced conversations are part of the job. Having structured documentation that explains what changed during the life of the project makes these tricky client discussions much less stressful.

Plus, if it’s easy to summarize and share that documentation with your clients directly, they’ll maintain confidence in the fact that your business is handling their projects professionally. If your team has one system that they trust as the source of truth for project-level data, and if you can leverage that system to share information with your clients and partners, the stress of keeping everybody on the same page disappears. 

A good project management tool facilitates communication and collaboration by providing a platform where all parties can share information and updates seamlessly.

Timeline Management

Delivering projects on time is essential for maintaining healthy client relationships and a positive company image. Your clients have tight deadlines, and they often rely on you to provide them with the professional assurance that their project can move forward.

Environmental review can be the final step for your client before securing a loan or selling a property, so staying as close as possible to initial timeline estimates goes a long way towards building trust and winning future business. 

By implementing best practices to track deadlines and milestones, your team can work more efficiently to provide clients with timely project completions. While it’s important to keep track of project-specific deadlines, the best project managers also know upcoming due dates across multiple projects that they’re responsible for.

If your firm monitors deadlines using dedicated Excel spreadsheets for each project, it’s easy to get caught off-guard when you realize one employee is scheduled to do two tasks due on the same day. 

Environmental consulting firms need software that helps monitor project schedules to ensure that your clients don’t face unforeseen delays. The ideal project management software will enable your team not only to track project-specific schedules, but also deadlines and milestones across your universe of all projects.

How Aldoa's Project Management Software Helps

The work you do ranges everywhere from generating simple compliance reports to overseeing complex remediation efforts. Whether it's a property owner, a corporation, or a government agency, your clients rely on you to keep our world clean and safe. It’s only fair that you should be able to rely on a software provider to make your job easier. 

Aldoa offers a comprehensive project management solution designed specifically for environmental consulting firms.

We understand your unique workflow and know that traditional tools are not fit for the job. With purpose-built tools such as task tracking and capacity planning, Aldoa has everything you need to complete quality projects efficiently.

Here’s how Aldoa’s project management features can benefit your business:

Task Tracking & Project Scheduling

Task tracking and project planning are the foundation for timely milestone completion. Aldoa allows you to manage every project in a single platform, assign tasks to team members and subcontractors, create project schedules broken down by phase, and monitor progress through notifications about upcoming deadlines.

Aldoa’s task tracking and project planning features include:

• Project Planning: Divide projects into phases, sub-phases, and tasks, each with specific start/end dates.
• Task Tracking: Assign out work to your employees and include specific deliverables, due dates, documents, priority levels, and categories of work. 
• Notifications & Reminders: Notify your project team when changes have been made to a specific task or deliverable. Automatically send reminders, either through Aldoa or directly to your email inbox, as due dates are approaching.
• Calendar View: View your upcoming Tasks on a unified calendar that automatically syncs to Microsoft Outlook. Pull up global or project-specific calendars with one click. 
• Document Storage: Attach documents to both Tasks and projects with unlimited storage capacity.

Resource Management & Capacity Planning

Understanding your employees’ workload and productivity is key for optimizing labor utilization and ensuring that projects remain within scope. Aldoa allows you to schedule work for employees, track their hourly commitments on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, monitor your team’s bandwidth, and know when you have the capacity to take on new work. 

Aldoa’s resource management & capacity planning features include:

• Employee Scheduler: Assign a specific number of hours of work to your employees, and view employees’ upcoming schedules across multiple projects. 
• Project-Level Resource Manager: Monitor the resources you’re dedicating to each project, and link employee schedules to Tasks. 
• GANTT Charts: Build GANTT charts using project schedules to easily share status updates with your clients. 
• Utilization Rate Reporting: Automatically calculate utilization rates by employee or by employee type to understand if your team is maximizing their time to generate revenue. 

A Single Source of Truth for Your Data

Having one platform to store all of your project data is absolutely essential to keeping your team on the same page. If every project manager has their own way of organizing their work, it becomes a burden on the team to decipher where each project stands.

Excel is undoubtedly a useful tool, but when your project data lives in siloed spreadsheets, it’s difficult to track down the information you need and trust that it’s up-to-date. Plus, if all of your data lives in a single platform, you can run queries and reports that you’d otherwise have to manually track by combing through multiple sources or files. 

Aldoa serves as a single source of truth for your data, and includes many organizational and tracking features such as:

• Dashboards: Access project dashboards with a single click to see relevant information such as contract dates, proposal amounts, upcoming deadlines, site addresses, project teams, and more. 
• Shared Notepads: Track important project information on shared notepads that save in real time, so your team can easily find status updates, client concerns, and property descriptions.
• Client and Vendor Information: Store all of your client, subcontractor, and vendor information in one single location, including billing contacts, site contacts, emails, phone numbers, notes, associated projects, and more.
• Reporting and Querying: Run customizable reports to pull up critical information right when you need it. See upcoming deadlines for the next month, invoices paid to all labs in 2022, utilization rates for staff scientists, permit applications past due, and much more. 

Why Choose Aldoa’s Project Management Solution?

Aldoa is purpose-built for the unique needs of environmental consulting firms. Our software streamlines workflows, increases operational efficiency, and helps businesses deliver projects on time and within budget.

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

Explore Aldoa’s project management software today and see how it can help transform your firm's operations. Contact us to schedule a personalized demo and take the first step towards more efficient project management.