1. Mekko Graphics-Based Professional Services Dashboard
David Goldstein January 2013

2. Purpose of this Presentation
The following slides are a sample of a weekly dashboard that a professional services firm can use to track its performance.
The dashboard was created by extracting data from our time management and CRM systems, analyzing it using Excel PivotTables, and presenting it in PowerPoint.
The data are disguised and are based on a company with about 50 billable consultants.
The charts are described in several blog posts in:

3. Notes on Consulting Process
Each consultant enters timesheet information weekly.
Management forecasts hours for each consultant by project for the upcoming four weeks.
The sales team divides opportunities into fours phases. We assign dollar values to opportunities in the last three (need identified, pre-proposal and proposal) and track these.
When a project is started we add its estimated hours to our backlog and deduct from this as we complete work.
From a technical perspective, data were collected using:
Microsoft CRM to track opportunities
Edison’s Attic’s Bigtime for project and time tracking
A home grown Excel macro to extract data from CRM and Bigtime’s SQL Server databases and populate Excel PivotTables

4. Utilization and Hours Worked
actual
budget
Utilization is a good indicator of profitability. We compute it by dividing billable hours by available hours. We also include billable hours in the graph to tie this graph to upcoming graphs and so that employees can see the relationship between the two variables.

5. Consulting Hours by Client
actual
budget
With this 100% stacked bar, you can quickly see what percentage of your business comes from your biggest clients and how this is trending over a two month period.

6. Consulting Hours by Project Week of 9/7 Actual
This marimekko chart provides information on the mix of clients and projects from the previous week. It can identify if we’re spread too thin or are overly dependent on large projects of clients.

7. Billable Hours by Project Actual Versus Budget Week of 9/7
We use the stop lights in Excel to highlight differences between actual and budget for the previous week. This is a good check on our estimation process and it helps identify projects that could be behind or could go over budget.

8. Consulting Hours by Project Budgeted for Week of 9/14
Like the previous marimekko chart, this chart displays project/client mix. In this instance for the upcoming week.

9. Consulting Backlog By Project in Hours
The 100% stacked bar provides a summary of backlog by project. The second bar is an explosion of the data for our smaller projects.

10. Sales Pipeline as of 9/14
The Marimekko chart captures the each significant project in the pipeline, organized by stage. You can see the relative importance of both individual projects and the stage itself.