Monograph is a practice operations platform designed to help architects and engineers oversee projects, timesheets, and forecasts in one, integrated, and simple software interface. ‘Resource’ is an important new set of tools inside of Monograph that will help firms better manage their most precious resources: time and talent.
Monograph Resource
‘Resource’ is expected to reduce the time it takes to plan for the week across several team members and various projects by up to 50 percent. Most AEC firms begin their weeks on Monday with morning meetings between firm leaders, project managers, and staff discussing project priorities and juggling project schedules and deliverables. It is a necessary part of weekly life inside any sized AE firm but one in which smaller firms handle these tasks more ad hoc and without the aid of a staff professional solely dedicated for such resource allocation process work.
Monograph’s new ‘Resource’ dashboard features help AE firms plan their weekly workloads efficiently.
More importantly, these Monday meetings are often largely fragmented with firms relying on vocal updates lacking visual feedback versus others who congregate around a screen with a project manager manipulating spreadsheets that track progress.
AE Operations Research
“Based on our research, we estimate that between $37,500 and $165,000 or more of billable time is spent annually on these Monday morning meetings among firms with five or more employees,” said Robert Yuen, CEO of Monograph. “Through Resource, we’re giving firms the ability to ditch the spreadsheets and instead leverage a digital tool that simplifies, streamlines, and optimizes these weekly planning meetings.”
What Resource Delivers
Monograph’s new ‘Resource’ dashboard gives AE professionals and their teams an overall view of the week’s work and allows them to manipulate units of time in a “button up” fashion so they can understand the impact of that decision in real-time on the allocated budget for the project, its impact on staying on track, over and under schedule, etc.
The Monograph folks believe this helps firms determine and assure that no one employee is spread too thin, or that one project is behind on progress while another is ahead. The technology also helps the team aligned on all efforts without the need for spreadsheets.
“We believe Resource provides a streamlined solution that will help firms improve project outcomes and minimize the amount of lag time inherent in manipulating schedules for individuals during these meetings,” adds Alex Dixon, Head of Product of Monograph. “We can either shrink the amount of time spent in these meetings, open up this time to discuss higher-level strategic alignment across team members, or in some instances remove the need for this meeting entirely! The best talent-based outcome would be that team members get to discuss blockers and where improvement could be made from the previous week’s work.”
Resource will be available to all Monograph customers beginning November 30, 2020. For more information, please visit: https://monograph.io/
Architosh Analysis and Commentary
The AE industry has been in need of software solutions like Monograph for quite some time. Two decades ago there was a healthy set of practice management solutions built specifically for architecture and engineering firms and many built by architects with software or database development skills. Sadly, most of those solutions never gained significant enough user bases to sustain development. Additionally, those built on workgroup relational database platforms like FileMaker Pro never made the jump to the Web quickly enough or successfully enough. As modern web technologies enabled a new generation of SaaS tools to spring up in the first decade of this century, the AEC industry moved towards other types of solutions, many often built for broader industries and fields.
Monograph is built and designed by architects too, like many of the excellent FileMaker Pro based solutions for decades ago, but Monograph is a fully modern SaaS tool. One of the compelling features of Monograph is the development team’s commitment to a “less is more” philosophy, providing a UI/UX that cuts the chase about what the tool is for and why it exists. This latest ‘Resource’ feature set rounds out Monograph nicely.
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