Matthew is a Managing Partner at LifeSci Consulting and has an impressive 20+ years of experience in life sciences. Prior to his role at LifeSci, Matthew co-founded Corsica Life Sciences, and at the start of 2022 they merged with another boutique consultancy to create LifeSci Consulting. Merging the two entities created a harmonious combination of business knowledge and life science expertise.

Challenge

Matthew recognised that LifeSci could improve operating efficiency if they had better insight into where each consultant's time was spent. Furthermore, they needed software to approximate who would be available when putting together proposals. Before Projectworks, attempting to understand overall capacity dynamics and who could take on more work was a significant pain point for LifeSci.

“In my role, having more of a BD focus and building a lot of proposals, I need to know who is available to be staffed on new projects.” — Matthew, Managing Partner

The Solution

Matthew and the LifeSci leadership team chose Projectworks due to its powerful resourcing functions—since implementing Projectworks, LifeSci has realized substantial efficiency gains with the ability to properly manage time and resources.

LifeSci crucially needed to understand where their people were spending their time and who had space in their calendar to take on more work. Now with Projectworks, they can see exactly how many hours all their staff have been assigned and on which project, with colourful visual clues to help quickly identify under- and over-resourced staff. In addition, this function is beneficial when taking on new clients as they can see who is available to take on more work.

“Projectworks is very helpful for knowing that a month from now, these are the people who will have capacity to be staffed on other projects. Therefore, that’s the pool of resources I can access for this new project. So that’s how I primarily use it, looking for who is available to potentially take on additional work.”

Another useful function Projectworks has offered LifeSci is robust forecasting. This mechanism allows them to identify how they can resource future projects and see their consultants’ real-time capability to take on new projects. As a result, they can now get the most out of their people by appropriately filling their time with future projects without the fear of over-resourcing.

A bonus for LifeSci has been the reporting function Projectworks provides. They can pull out insightful reports to analyse their utilisation at a high level. This helps them identify trends in efficiency and informs their future hiring plans. Reports are vital for busy people like Matthew who want to quickly get an overview of how their business is running.

The Result:

• More focused resourcing
• Faster and more accurate proposal creation

Consistency is vital for accurate forecasting and reporting. Having one system for the whole team has been advantageous for LifeSci as they now have a streamlined process for consultants to submit timesheets. With better data, they can make better predictions and closely monitor their project budget. Now that they have good data, the next step in their Projectworks journey is to assess and monitor project margin performance.

“The next step for us as a leadership team is using the ability to understand project margins. For this we need time reporting from the consultants on the team to be consistent and timely. Then we can start to understand where we are relative to budgets, margins, and economic health on an individual project basis.”

The team at LifeSci is now on-top of their resourcing and ready to spend their time doing what they do best, offering exceptional counsel and guidance to their clients. We are delighted to support them through their continued growth and are excited for the future of LifeSci Consulting.

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