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MATT CRAFTON, from page 5

the amount of work and whether the right staff is on-hand to get the work done. However, from a top level management perspective, over many years of experience, we found a much simpler system. Each month, I ask our department managers to give me a quick guesstimate of their workload over future months one and two, months three and four, and months five and six. Those estimates are represented using arrows: an up, green arrow means they will be busy and will meet or exceed their target; a side-to-side, yellow arrow means they will be steady and may or may not meet their target; and a down, red arrow means they need work and will struggle to meet their target. Put them all together and you’ve got a pretty good picture of what the coming months will look like. Too simplistic? Maybe, but it works for us. We’ve found that this approach gives us a fairly accurate picture of what our workload will be for the coming six months. It also means we don’t have legions of people spending hours and hours in intricate spreadsheets trying to project revenue and costs down to the penny. And honestly, we’ve found we get as much accuracy with the simple system as we did with the complex. Granted, this system, like any other, requires integrity and accountability. Our managers know that I expect honesty in their arrow projections. If a manager paints an all green, arrows up, rosy picture, but doesn’t meet their target utilization, they know we’ll be having a talk about that. Again, I’m not at all down on PMs and department managers getting into the nitty-gritty of project planning. I’m all for it. But, from the top level perspective, this simple, gut feel approach works for our business. MATT CRAFTON is president and CEO of Crafton Tull, an architecture, engineering, and surveying firm based in Rogers, Arkansas. Contact him at matt.crafton@craftontull.com.

holidays), we aren’t profitable. Granted, like any other metric, staff utilization can be manipulated by the unscrupulous. You can pump up your utilization by charging an excess of hours to jobs, but then you risk running out of fees quickly. Or, you can charge actual billable time to overhead to keep your budget looking good, but your utilization suffers. We tell our people to “charge it like you work it” and let the numbers fall where they may. Most firms I know include integrity as a core value, so being honest on time sheets should be a given. If you’re going to have the word “integrity” on a poster on the wall, then you ought to practice it throughout your business, including the time sheet. So, how to manage workload versus staff, and better yet, how to predict what it’s going to be over the coming months? We used to spend many hours in spreadsheets in the pursuit of estimating our revenue versus costs over future time periods. Each project manager had a workload spreadsheet showing each of his or her projects, and each month they were to estimate the revenue for certain time periods. Those PM workload projection spreadsheets linked to department spreadsheets which then rolled up all the PM numbers for that department. We then added “marketing projections” for projects we were sure would be in-house in future months; and all departments were then linked and rolled into one giant spreadsheet showing projected company revenue for the coming months. I know firms that use similar systems, whether spreadsheets or enterprise software, to do this. You can get really intricate by projecting the hours each person will work on each project in each week. You can then roll that information into summary spreadsheets and reports to project how busy each person, department, office, or division will be. I’m not opposed to that. PMs and department managers gain real, useful insight by analyzing

BIRMINGHAM, from page 7

Birmingham.

expires in May, there is a concerted effort to convince the legislature to extend it for another seven years. While several historic structures have already been renovat- ed or are underway – the Pizitz Building, the Lyric Theater, and the Thomas Jefferson Hotel, among them – there’s still plenty of opportunity, according to real estate listings. At least three historic downtown properties were on the mar- ket in March for a combined $2.5 million. Historic preservation was far from the only thing taking place in Birmingham, then and now. Urban landfill, mul- tifamily housing, and retail development were key aspects to the Birmingham boom. No one knows that better than Butch Charlan, founding principal at Charlan Brock & As- sociates (Maitland, FL). In addition to other projects, Charlan’s firm designed LIV Parkside, a 228-unit apartment building. A major piece of the ongoing effort to create urban density, LIV Parkside contains 3,000 square feet of retail space. Charlan said the city has opened the door to firms and construction companies, making it easy to work in

“Evidently, there’s a friendly development market,” he says.

While small-scale redevelopment of historic buildings had been underway since the late 1980s, it took profound local, state, and national forces to kick start the massive redevel- opment now underway, says David Fleming, president and CEO of REV Birmingham, a local economic development or- ganization. The 19-acre Railroad Park, opened in 2010, transformed an old railyard into a lush public greenspace. In 2013, the Dou- ble-A Birmingham Barons baseball team returned to down- town Regions Field. And in that same year, the tax credit was approved. In keeping with the national trend of empty nesters and millennials shrugging off the suburbs and re- turning to the city, urban housing was suddenly in great de- mand. “All of that together has created a new wave of momentum in Birmingham, and that’s why you see a lot of cranes every- where,” Fleming says.

THE ZWEIG LETTER April 4, 2016, ISSUE 1146

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