“We’re witnessing a new era of how firms will handle their increased workflow while finding new ways to provide better customer service,” says Kenneth Jones, executive managing director of Lyndon Group, Newport Beach, Calif., a project management consulting organization working with accounting firms. “Clients are searching for a firm that will give them personalized service, with absolute attention on critical transactions. With a project management team in place, whether in-house or outsourced, firms are finding a new playing ground to compete on.” Many firms turn to project management out of a twin desire for excellence in client service and to sharpen efficiency of engagements by reserving only the resources needed. The inevitable result, say firms, is a healthier bottom line.

“By knowing the supply and demand requirements for the work currently engaged by the firm, we’re able to not just meet the professional standards, but have the confidence that we can live up to the commitments we’ve made to each client,” say Dave Gaino, chairman of Apple Growth Partners in Akron, Ohio, and Kevin Archer, head of Apple’s ERP consulting group. “That reputation for meeting our commitments has grown over the years, and leads to client referrals, as well as attorney or banker referrals, who’ve come to depend upon our commitment for meeting promised due dates. We’ve also begun to incorporate project management information in our proposal packages, particularly when the nature of the client we’re proposing to understands and appreciates the value of project management.”

“Project management is a good way to organize your resources, but it fails in that it doesn’t get to the heart of making the process more efficient,” warns Dustin Hostetler, business consultant and Lean Six Sigma “Master Black Belt” at Rea & Associates, Wooster, Ohio, a firm of some 230 staffers in 11 offices in Ohio.

The Form

Product management hinges on “replicable methodologies,” says consultant Gale Crosley, president of Atlanta-based Crosley+Company and co-author of At the Crossroads (John Wiley & Sons). She adds that product management is “one of the key features” in growth that firms don’t know about, the idea being to become more efficient and effective not only in offerings such as audits but also for one-time projects such as consulting and valuation work.

Gaino and Archer say their firm uses project management “extensively” in three areas: basic budgeting and scheduling for recurring client work; sophisticated project management for large consulting engagements; and a mid-level project management for internal process improvement projects. In the early 1980s, Apple built a budget model detailing each engagement, including small engagements such as individual tax returns, breaking down the budget to the monthly amount per staff class or staff level.

Gaino and Archer recall it as “a massive effort initially to determine the budgets and then compile the data so we could access the supply-versus-demand in total, by staff level, and in particular during peak months by staff level. We then compared the demand to the availability, taking into account the seasonality of the work schedule, administrative time, vacation, CPE, part-time status, flex-time status, etc. With 110 total staff, it’s difficult to be totally precise, and often difficult to have the exact number of staff needed at the precise levels dictated by the client demands, but we feel this project management tool enables us to gain a very high degree of precision in forecasting our staff needs, our staff availability, and dealing with any gaps or surpluses that should result.”

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