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Business Process

Understand the business process that Conduite supports.

Introduction

At the heart of every company there's a business process that orchestrates the main activities that are implemented. Conduite is built for service companies that:

  • Conduct business in 2 main phases:
    • Business Development / Sales - You manage a pipeline of opportunities that eventually turn into contracts and projects you execute.
    • Execution - You deliver work according to a contractual scope of work.
  • Sell mostly people's time (labor) based on daily rates
  • Manage financial objective based on opportunity and contract margins.

For each of these phases, Conduite provides apps and KPIs that help you manage and track the health of your business.

Overview Of The Process

The overall business process can be broken down in 5 steps. It shows show the Conduite apps to support its implementation.

1. Develop anAn opportunityOpportunity

Your sales team develops leads that eventually become opportunities. You manage these opportunities with a CRM in which you qualify key attributes such as client name, amount, probability, start date and duration. The sales team keeps updating these attributes as discussions go with the prospects.

2. Create and& updateUpdate theThe offerOffer

If successful, your sales team will convince your prospect to send an offer. You start preparing a document with the appropriate narrative (methodology, risk analysis, ...), budget and timeline. In order to produce the two latter elements, you use a Budget Builder that helps you plan over time the number of days for each role (or person) needed to execute the scope of work. That tool also provides you with the margin you can expect to make on this contract.

In order to secure the availability of the required roles in the event you win the opportunity, your sales team sends a Resourcing Request (days / role / period) to your Capacity Manager. S/He can pencil that workload into the Capacity Planner and starts working on potential resourcing conflicts. The Resourcing Request includes the probability of the opportunity so that the expected workload can be weighted.

What is a Capacity Manager?

The Capacity Manager (or Resourcing Manager) is the person who's job is to make sure that there is a consolidated view of who's working on what and when (present and future). As the main resource of your company is people's time, this is an essential function. It will allow you to know whether you have too much work coming up and need to hire, or if you need to make adjustments to manage a slowdown in activity.

As discussions evolve with the prospect, your sales team send updated Resourcing Requests to your Capacity Manager in order to for her/him to have the latest information.

3. Sign theThe contractContract and& kickKick offOff theThe projectProject

You've won the opportunity! 🎉 You endure the final administrative hurdles and sign the contract. It's time to kick off the project and set up the internal tooling. You need to configure your Project Dashboard that will help you track the execution of the project with the financial data from the contract (total amount, margin,labor amount, expenses amount, expected margin) and with the most up to date Resourcing Request. That last piece in very important since you want to know how you team is doing against the initial plan.

At this point you can hand over the project to a Project Manager and start executing the scope of work.

4. Manage The Project

Your team is actively working, i.e. spending days, on the project. It's important to have regular updates on how things are progressing in order to avoid bad surprises. You ask your Project Managers to update their Project Dashboards on a regular basis with how much time each person has spent on the project and with how many days s/he thinks will be required to deliver the expected scope of work, i.e. an updated the labor forecast. The Project Dashboard consolidates this updated information and feeds it back the Project Manager in the form of KPIs that tell her/him how s/he's doing financially.

As a company you need to centralize these updates to have a global overview. You ask you Project Managers to send a Project Report Out that includes specific KPIs from the Project Dashboard, the labor forecast and a short narrative on what happened in the last period to give context to the numbers. The labor forecast goes the Capacity Manager that can update the Capacity Planner accordingly.

With this update cycle in place you are able to keep track of projects (push corrective actions and/or praise colleagues) and of your capacity at all times.

5. Close The Project

After a lot of hard work, countless client meetings and presentations the project


comes to an end. The client is happy 🤩 (or not 😡). 


  • You get a lead, that eventually becomes an opportunity.
  • At some point, the prospect asks you to submit an offer.
  • You create the offer. It includes:
    • A budget based on the level of effort required to execute the scope of work
    • A timeline based on a sequence of execution

The level of effort and the timeline constitute a Resource Request. It's a simple table that outline how many days per month (or period) you need for each person (or role) involved in the execution of a contract.

  • You send that Resourcing Request to your Capacity Manager so that s/he can update the companies Capacity Planner.
  • Once your offer is accepted and the contract is signed, you 

The KPIs that help you manage and track the health of your business.


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