This post is brought to you by Mosaic
In the architecture and engineering industry, firm leadership often find themselves making decisions based on instinct and fear that they don’t have enough work. But the end result is that you’re always at the mercy of the business. Everyone needs visibility into what’s happening to ensure you have control over your projects rather than them controlling you.
Fortunately, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled a more efficient and strategic approach to firm management. Here are six examples from AI-powered resource management software Mosaic.
It’s Friday morning, and you’re in a planning meeting for the following week. Your mission is to ensure every team member has enough work to keep them busy—easier said than done. You have to know:
What everyone is working on
What deadlines are coming up across potential projects
Team skills, roles, industries, or other project requirements
Understanding all of this would typically involve extensive discussions or maybe simply picking the first thing that comes to mind, without consideration of key information. The result is people are often working on the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Mosaic’s AI analyzes these data points and more to suggest projects for team members. The software gives you all of the information you need to ensure that everyone is busy and working on the right things. This not only significantly increases utilization and profit, but equally important, also prevents overscheduling and burnout.
Let’s say you’ve just secured a project that starts in a couple of months, and you need to staff it with a director, a PM, a senior architect, and a designer. Traditionally, this is an inefficient game of back-and-forth: Who’s available during that time? Do they have the skills? When will their current project finish? You call, email, and send instant messages—and then what happens? The project start is delayed, then the scope changes, and it will take twice as long as expected. And this is happening with every project.
The result is teams are stuck working nights and into the weekend to get projects over the finish line. Meanwhile, there are others who don’t have enough to do. Every decision has a ripple effect across the team and company. Managing the volume of data—all the dates and dependencies—is the perfect job for AI.
Mosaic analyzes past projects to identify staff who match work criteria and recommend them for upcoming work. And this capability gets smarter over time, learning patterns of behavior like which combinations of staff work most efficiently or who a project manager likes to work with, pushing those to the top of its suggestions list to improve recommendations.
The main flaw of scheduling tools is that plans are constantly changing due to delays, so keeping track of and accounting for plan updates is impossible. Mosaic not only makes it easy to create and update plans, but features patented technology that automatically reschedules work based on what has or hasn’t occurred. It even recommends staff who can help get the project back on track.
Firm leadership needs to know whether there’s too much work and they need to hire, or not enough work and they need to bring in more. Make the decision too late, and there’s staff working overtime. Too early and there are people on the bench, not billing their time.
Mosaic solves this classic dilemma, looking at workload for each role and comparing it against the capacity of team members in those roles. AI then identifies where demand will exceed capacity and provides hiring alerts with recommendations. For example, Mosaic could assess the number of projects coming next quarter as well as the availability and workload of staff and alert you to hire a project manager within the next 60 days.
Wouldn’t it be nice to know which projects are most profitable? And which ones most often cause scope creep and should be avoided? Mosaic’s AI analyzes historical data through our data integrations to identify where you make money and where you don’t. Our AI pinpoints commonalities between projects to essentially say “do more of this and less of that”, so you know which proposals to pursue and which to pass on.
In the architecture space, many firms struggle to accurately forecast billing and revenue, if they forecast at all. As a result, they run their businesses month-to-month. Fortunately, machine learning can predict billing and revenue by analyzing project, planning, timesheet, budget, and other data. No math to crunch, no gut to rely on.
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By leveraging Mosaic’s AI for project and resource planning, firms can operate more efficiently than ever before. AI-powered planning can help reduce long hours and improve the quality of life for our employees. Greater efficiency can help control schedules and budgets, while increasing profitability and salaries. And because Mosaic works with the financial tools firms currently use, like Quickbooks and Deltek, teams can start seeing improvements right away. Such improvements will have a dramatic impact on your firm—and the industry.
Learn more about how Mosaic can help your practice here.
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