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In This Chapter Use Teams to Link Staff to Projects |
BigTime was built from the ground up to work with growing professional services firms, and the version you install will be custom-fitted to your specific industry. It's been installed by thousands of firms, and it's currently being used to track projects, staffing, budgets, tasks, and more in architecture/engineering firms, IT services firms, law firms, accounting firms, PR firms, graphic design firms and other consulting organizations around the world.
All of these firms have requirements that are as unique as yours, and all of them have started out with the same box that you have. BigTime's learned a lot from the hundreds (sometimes thousands) of other firms in your industry that we've worked with, and you get the benefit of that experience. It's not just that our support team will understand your industry; their experience is built right into the product.
That's because you'll select a specific industry skin when you install the software, and that skin will be used to configure the system for you automatically. You won't need to read a chapter on how to configure BigTime to work with a law firm, or an accounting firm, or an IT services firm. The system comes pre-configured to meet your industry's unique requirements.
Even though the system is custom-fitted to your industry, many of the organizing principals we've uncovered can be applied across all of the industries we support. In fact, BigTime takes a similar approach to organizing your data, no matter what industry you are in.
For example, your firm may work with jobs, matters, projects, engagements, accounts or cases. BigTime creates a mini-website to organize all of the information for that entity no matter what your firm calls it. We refer to that mini website as a "project dashboard," and it pops up in its own window; it has its own menu (and its own set of security features); and it puts everything the system knows about that particular project (or "matter" or "job" or "engagement") at your fingertips. We'll introduce you to the Project Dashboard in this chapter.
We won't spend lots of time navigating through screens and menus in this chapter. Instead, our goal is to help you understand how BigTime is organized--helping you get a feel for those organizing principals that have made BigTime valuable in other firms.
We'll start out with a quick look at who uses BigTime and how security is setup out of the box. Then, we'll talk about projects and how we organize them. We'll touch on budgeting in BigTime, how to staff a project, and how most firms log time and expenses against them.
At the end of the chapter, we'll spend some time talking about how your firm should evaluate BigTime by showing you how other firms in similar industries work. We'll outline a typical project "life cycle" for different types of firms, and we'll give you a quick reference to other areas of the System Guide which can give you more detail about each phase of that life cycle.
One of our most important lessons from several years of helping professional services firms get the most from their BigTime installations is simply that those firms change as they grow. Whether you're growing from 5 people to 50 or from 50 to 250, the bigger the firm gets the more hands are involved in its day to day management.
BigTime was not designed as a single user system. It has a workflow for common tasks like entering time or creating invoices, and it assumes that more than one person may be involved in the process.
In a one or two person consulting shop, there is only one person involved in setting up a customer contract, creating a budget, keeping track of a project's progress, billing, and accounting. As firms grow, the number of players involved in standard tasks (such as reviewing and approving timesheets, generating and reviewing invoices, or setting up project budgets) grows as well.
Invoices, for example, may be created by your accounting person but reviewed by project managers. So, BigTime includes a "draft" screen for your accounting person, and a "review" screen for your managers. If you're a one-man shop, this may seem like an extra screen (or an extra step), but for growing firms--with several members of the staff helping make every project a success--it's not.
BigTime accommodates this multi-user workflow automatically with several key features.
As you review BigTime, one of the first things you'll do is grant different users in your organization advanced access to the system. While you can create as many different security groups as you'd like, BigTime tends to be organized around three general user classes: everyday ("standard") users, managers, and administrators.
Because the system's documentation is also designed around those three classes of users, it's helpful to understand who they are.
Standard Users are typically staff members. They are responsible for entering their timesheets into the system, submitting expense reports (if your firm tracks expenses), and making corrections when managers ask for them. These users don't typically create project budgets or add new projects or staff to the system. They don't need access to all of the management level reporting or accounting data BigTime imports from QuickBooks. This type of user typically composes the bulk of your BigTime user base.
Managers need access to a much larger set of functions. While managers need to track time and expenses (just like standard users), they are also responsible for creating or maintaining project budgets and timelines, managing teams, and reviewing and approving timesheets, expenses, invoices, and other items.
Managers don't need to change system-level settings and they don't need access to QuickBooks (or the firm's accounting data). They may, however, need access to project-level accounting data (e.g., contract information, invoice history, or A/R aging information).
Administrators are typically accounting and IT personnel who are responsible for keeping BigTime up and running. There aren't typically more than 2 or 3 administrators at a firm, and some firms like to split up admin responsibilities (giving system-centric functions to an IT admin and financial admin functions to an accounting person).
The system expects that your firm has a mix of all three of these types of users. While your firm may combine some of these functions into one, or split some of them up among several users, BigTime was built with the assumption that each of these roles is played by someone. Keep that in mind as you start to review workflow and management options within the system.
BigTime treats everyone who logs into the system the same. They're all staff members, whether they are owners, employees, temporary staff or contractors. If you need to grant a user the right to login and use BigTime for any reason, add them to the system as a new staff member.
The system guide can help you link them to employee or contractor records in your accounting system. That's just a data entry issue. Here, you just need to remember that every user is considered a staff member in BigTime, no matter what role they play in your firm.
If every person who logs into the system is considered a staff member, then how do you distinguish between administrators, managers, staff members, contractors, and business owners? In BigTime, you use security rights to make that distinction.
Every user who logs into the system can see only the screens and reports that you've granted them the right to see. When we talk about "standard users", "managers" and "administrators," we're actually talking about system security rights. Those three roles correspond to three default user security groups that ship out of the box with BigTime. So, you can turn a "standard" user into an "administrative" user by making them a member of the "system administrator" security group. We'll talk more about security in the staff management section of the guide.