VPVI-22 - Microsoft · VPVI-22: Solve Your Project Tracking Issues Brandy Timm, SGA Design Group ... SQL Skills Required –SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ... $50k / 2080 = $24.04/hour

VPVI-22:Solve Your Project Tracking Issues

Brandy Timm, SGA Design GroupDarrell Aaron, CCG Consulting Group

VPVI-22: Itinerary

| Introductions

– Brandy Timm – SGA Design Group

– Darrell Aaron – Central Consulting Group

| Overview of SGA’s Project Tracking Info Center

| How the Idea Originated

| How it Works

| How is it Used

| Future Enhancements

| What Else is Possible

Getting to Know Me

| SGA for 8 years

| Deltek Vision for 11 years

| 15 years of project accounting and analysis

experience

| Daily focus is project tracking and performance,

revenue forecasting, and accounting process

management

| One of two company vision administrators

| Facilitator of Vision database customization within my

firm

Life outside of work

Family, Hobbies, Passions…

LET’S OPEN DOORS TOGETHER.

®

SGA Design Group, P.C.

| 1995 SGA Design Group founded in Tulsa, OK with a focus on volume programs for retail and health and wellness

| 2004 SGA opens second office in Bentonville, AR

| 104 Total staff with 30 licensed architects and 20+ LEED accredited professionals

| 49 of 50 states licensed

| +4,500 Projects completed

| +1,000 Projects completed in 2018

| 2008 SGA began using Deltek Vision, currently on 7.6

Getting to Know Me

| CCG since January 2018

| Vision since 2015

| Handle mostly custom reports, invoices and

automations

| SQL, reporting and data analytics guy for the past 11

years

| I have a master’s degree

| …

| …in education

Life outside of work

Certified Urban Chicken Farmer

Other Interesting Thing About Me

Central Consulting Group

Not our logo

Our logo

| Consulting firm focusing mostly on Deltek

Vision and Vantagepoint

| Founded in 2002

| Serve over 1,200 clients worldwide

| If it’s possible, then we can make it happen

WHAT IT IS

| Project Tracking UDIC

– Our firms solution to improve project tracking and

performance visibility

– Includes tabs for monitoring:

• Contract Status and Amounts

• Invoicing Progress

• Collections

• Budget & Performance

• Milestone Dates

• Forecasting & Projections

WHAT IT DOES

| Contracts Tab– Auto Populates from

Project Info Center

Change Management

Tab

– Visibility, Project

Info Center visible to

accounting and

executives only.

WHAT IT DOES

| Invoicing Tab– Provides summary of Compensation, Billed, and Balance

– Broken Out by labor,

consultant, and

reimbursable

– Tracks at project and

phase level

– Update % Complete

feeds into projects at

Risk Metrics

WHAT IT DOES

| A/R Tab– Billed, Received, and Unpaid Summary

– Lists all invoices generated, and provides visibility to collections

progress with notes field

WHAT IT DOES

| BvA and PaR Tab– Budget versus Actual

• Present View of

Project Performance

– Projects at Risk

• Predictive View

of Project Performance

WHAT IT DOES

| Program Tracking Tab

– Tabs by program

– Access Rights by team

– Unique Tracking Fields

– Auto-Calculating dates

with override option

– Billing Milestone dates

trigger invoicing tab

updates

WHAT IT DOES

| Proto/Spec Req Tab

– Approval Tracking

– Budget Tracking

– Forecasting

– Billing Review Aid

– View by Period Cut-Off

– Status changes

– Add New

– Forecast add

HOW BRANDY CAME UP WITH THE IDEA

| How it started:

– Began as “can we track dates in Vision”.

– Asked to explore using Vision as project management platform with our Configuration, Unique Processes & Needs in mind.

• Do not own CRM or Planning

• Need management tool for influx of small, fast moving projects

• Need Central location, one source of truth

• Need to stop tracking in multiple formats

• Need Increased visibility to real time metrics

• Need Predictive tool for early identification of potential performance failure

– Based on previous Insight Sessions, customization was the solution.

– Reached out to Darrell who provided layout advice, technical expertise, homework, and lots of laughs.

– Single tab in project info center user defined grew to separate UDIC.

THE DECISION TO GO CUSTOM

| And you may find yourself

– Having you problems only partially solved by standard solutions


– Needing reports that you just can’t seem to find


– In another office


– With a project info center that takes ages to load

| And you may ask yourself

– How did I get here?

HOW IT’S MADE: THE MUNDANE

| We met once a week on Fridays from 2 – 4 pm via

Webex and phone.

| I would remote into a computer and we would talk

through everything and test live

HOW IT’S MADE: WHO DID WHAT

| Technical Solutions

| SQL Coding

| Sounding Board

| Child-like attitude

| Vision – as what to do and what was needed

| Testing, coordinating with the business

| Project Management

| Sounding Board

| Positive Mental Attitude

PICTURE OF BRANDY

HOW IT’S MADE: WHO DID WHAT

Brandy would

provide well written

notes to keep us on

task and on-priority

HOW IT’S MADE

| Technologies/Techniques used

– Vision & SQL Server Management Studio

– These are tools you’re already paying for

HOW IT’S MADE

| Vision Skills Required

– Creating custom fields, grids, info centers, etc…

– Workflows: User Initiated and Scheduled

– Workflow Actions: Validate Error, Validate Warning, Email Alert,

Column Field Change, Stored Procedure

HOW IT’S MADE

| SQL Skills Required

– SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE

– Variables

– Temp Tables

– …or table variables…

• But I’ll judge you if you use table variables

– CREATE PROCEDURE

– CREATE FUNCTION or CROSS APPLY

HOW IT’S MADE: IMPORTANT NOTE

SGA is on-premise for Vision, but this is

all possible with a cloud implementation

| SQL Server is free for developers

– You cannot run a production database on the free version

| You can request your database backup from cloud ops

– You can mess that one up, but it doesn’t matter

HOW IT’S MADE: PROGRAMMER TIPS

| Less is better

– Can you update everything at once?

| SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION READ UNCOMMITTED

| Mind your varchars and your nvarchars

| Do yourself a favor: create a function that prevents divide

by zero

| If possible, don’t update records already in a grid, just

delete them and reload them

HOW IT’S MADE: Challenges

NUMBERS!


Name Consistency

| You really want to have a good plan for naming grids

and the fields within those grids

| Examples here


Math

| Order of Operations: Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally

| Sorting

Grids are sorted by

only one column, so

just make a sort

column that sorts

how you want

HOW IT’S BEING USED

| Program Managers use as quick access to project status and performance

| Auto-recurring reports have been developed based on the budget vs actual and projects at risk metrics

| Forecasting previously done in separate excel sheets is now done in this UDIC

| Users have become comfortable switching to list view for searches/saved searches, exporting to excel

| Users enjoy the increased visibility and flexibility in working with and updating information

AND YOU MAY ASK YOURSELF

Can’t I do some, if not all of this already?(barring the notifications that is…)

Through...

1. Project Review

2. Reports

3. Planning

Well, let’s do some math

EVERYONE’S FAVORITE: MATH

Let’s say you got a project manager: Elizabeth

She makes $50k a year

She has a generous 6-week vacation plan so she

only works 46 weeks a year

Using standard functionality, she would need an

extra hour every week to do her job


$50k / 2080 = $24.04/hour

With benefits and payroll taxes more like

$24.04 * 1.22 = $29.33

That extra time costs you $1,349.18 per year.


With 10 Elizabeths that’s $13,491.80 per year

If she made $75k a year, that’s $20,237.70 per year

Now if she made $100k a year and you had 20

Elizabeths…you get the point

One single hour a week adds up

STOLEN FROM DELTEK CLARITY REPORT

STOLEN FROM DELTEK CLARITY REPORT

QUICK PLUG FOR THE CLARITY REPORT

https://info.deltek.com/40-AE-Clarity-Report

WHAT ELSE IS POSSIBLE

ANYTHING

WHAT ELSE IS POSSIBLE: EXAMPLE 1

Commission Automation

1. Commission is paid per sale

2. Lot’s of different commission plans

3. Many different people can earn a commission on the same

opportunity

4. Commission payout has to be amortized over the life of the

contract for 606 compliance

5. Was taking someone almost an entire week to calculate each

quarter



1. Set up a user-defined info center to track plans

2. Wrote SQL code to automate the calculation of commissions

3. That runs every day, so…1. People can see their commission grow (and notify early if something is odd)

2. The business can see if their estimate/accrual is appropriate

4. Custom reports for both the commission statement and the

expense





The average time to calculate commissions is down to a

few hours a quarter.


Vision/Vantagepoint Plays Nicely With Others

Do You…Use a different system for…

Project ManagementCRMLab TestingCorporate Accounting

“Friends don’t let friends integrate with Microsoft Project”









Saves TimeSaves LicensesSaves Money

THANK YOU AND QUESTIONS

Question Time

Documents

VPVI-22 - Microsoft · VPVI-22: Solve Your Project Tracking Issues Brandy Timm, SGA Design Group ... SQL Skills Required –SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ... $50k / 2080 = $24.04/hour