I manage team of team of consultants in a software company. We are responsible for the implementation of our software systems at customer sites. I am looking for a goal which will help my team ensure that they are capturing all of the chargeable time and thereby maximising revenue for each contract.
The work carried out on-site is easy enough because they have to get a site-visit sheet signed by the customer which details the time spent there. It is the time in the office which is not so easy. Preparation, phone calls, email etc., the little bits of time which on their own are not significant but can add up.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
Job/Project tracking?
Starting earlier in the work flow: how does the company know that a customer has purchased the software (and therefore will need on-site implementation)? Is a new record created in a job or project tracking system of some kind? Are expenses allocated against those jobs or projects (such as the time the consultants spend during on-site implementation)? Once everything is complete, is that the data that is given to Accounting in order to bill the client properly (or at least measure the costs associated with the job or project)?
My assumption is that performing the pre-implementation tasks is a good thing because it means that on-site implementation goes more smoothly and ultimately leads to happier customers.
In a company without such a system (perhaps where "billable hours" is the primary goal) any time spent on pre-implementation activities rather than on-site implementation could be considered "counter to the profitability goals of the company" (either implicitly or explicitly), and employees are going to be extremely reluctant to do them or admit even if they do. (You get more of what you measure; if all you measure/reward is on-site billable hours, then you're going to get lots of that, to the exclusion of all else.)
So in my opinion, you need a way to 1) capture, and 2) encourage (or at a minimum not discourage) those pre-implementation activities. Once you're capturing them somehow, you can see if any measurements might make sense as a performance measurement. Also, it would be best to find some way to measure the impact the current situation is having on the company.
An example scenario: are some consultants ignoring all preparation activities, billing lots of on-site hours as they flail about discovering new roadblocks or issues, and try to make things work? The end result: they are sucking all the profitability out of that particular job or project. ("We're billing lots of hours; how come we can't make any money on these deals?")
That last point - per-project profitability - is probably the best way to help adjust perceptions if you are unlucky enough to have the rest of the company (such as senior management) encouraging the wrong metric, even by default. You need to bring the problem to light before trying to implement a cure; otherwise you'll be perceived as working against the company's goals, and that's not a good situation for you personally, nor the employees you leave behind when you get canned for it.
So to wrap up:
If things go well, now you also have a way to quantify what you've accomplished. If they don't, you have measurements to use to make adjustments.
And if they really go poorly, you've gotten buy-in from above before acting (you're a team player, not a lone wolf), were being a professional during the effort, and have data at the end to prove what you learned.
And finally, once you have such a quantifiable measurement, it will be much easier to attach a goal to it (since that was the original question, after all). Perhaps there is some ratio of preparation time to implementation time, or maybe you want the goal tied directly to the per-project profitability, or...