Overview

Lane4, the performance development agency founded by Olympic Gold medalist Adrian Moorhouse MBE, implemented project portfolio and resource management solution Asta Teamplan  to manage their 40-50% year-on-year growth effectively. 

Asta Teamplan is being deployed to plan multiple projects in real-time and allocate resources more efficiently in order to maximise fee-earning potential.

The challenge

Lane4 consultants operate at board level and below with FTSE 500 companies to improve the performance of individuals, teams and organisations. 

They were using numerous labour-intensive processes to manage projects.  Their basic project management package for planning individual projects had its limitations so other tools were implemented, including Excel spreadsheets for management reporting and timesheets which required the manual re-entering of information into the project plans to help with resource planning.

In addition, Lane4 was seeing 40-50% year-on-year growth which meant that its consultant and client bases were growing rapidly, making the current systems harder to manage and increasingly unreliable.

Working with three disparate systems created enormous administrative overheads as progress was marked manually on plans and data pulled from different sources to produce reports.

It was difficult to obtain a consolidated programme view across all client projects.  Furthermore, the global picture of resource allocation was not always up-to-date, making it hard to assess the availability and suitability of consultants for particular jobs, forecast resource requirements and allocate teams to new projects.

This situation was further hampered by the large geographic area that consultants worked across and the large number of projects being worked on at any one time.

The need

Dominic Mahony, Olympic Bronze medalist and Portfolio Director at Lane4 commented "It was becoming more complex to allocate resources because we have multiple clients and multi-layered programmes. 

So we searched the market place for a project and resource management solution to help address these problems.  Having reviewed a total of eight project management software vendors, we turned to Asta for the solution."

The solution

Asta Teamplan and Asta Timesheet were selected because they had been implemented successfully in other management consultancies so Asta had a demonstrable understanding of the issues at hand. 

Also Lane4 required a high-level of reporting that is individual to their business and Asta was able to provide it.

"Our decision-making processes are now faster and accurate, and our valuable resources allocated effectively. "

The implementation of Asta Teamplan will enable Lane4 to accurately allocate the most suitable resources to projects and monitor project progress to guarantee no slippages take place. 

In addition, the use of Asta's web-based timesheet system by an increasing number of consultants will ensure all project plans are up to date, forecasting is accurate and ineffective utilisation of resources is eradicated.

Dominic Mahony commented "The full implementation of Asta Teamplan will give us real-time visibility across all our projects.  In addition, our decision-making processes will be faster and accurate and our valuable resources allocated effectively."

"Our decision-making processes are now faster and accurate, and our valuable resources allocated effectively."

Smooth implementation

Asta Development and Lane4 worked closely to ensure cultural acceptance of the project management and timesheet system. 

Lane4 sees project management technology as a key tool for driving the business forward.