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Before adopting 91��Ƭ��, LEES + Associates felt a pressure to answer all the municipal request for proposals (RFP) they came across—without really knowing whether they had the internal resources to complete the work should they win the job. According to Turnock, the firm’s “attitude was one of: well, if we get it, we’ll figure it out.” And they did; but it wasn’t without a fair bit of stress. “It’s great to win work,” Turnock said. “And we want to be able to go after things and be excited about them and have the resources to do [the jobs] well.” It was that desire that led the firm to 91��Ƭ��. 

“We had tried different strategies to forecast availability and workload to ensure we weren’t burning people out or under utilizing them,” Turnock said. Specifically, LEES + associates tried using spreadsheets and having their team email their work plan for the upcoming week. “Project managers sort of kept it all in their heads,” she said. But that didn’t give the team what they needed when it came to looking ahead, especially as projects were scheduled to conclude and new ones were set to begin. “That makes it quite hard when you’re trying to evaluate whether or not to go after a specific proposal,” Turnock said.

Ultimately, LEES + Associates adopted 91��Ƭ�� in order to improve their resource allocation capabilities—and they chose 91��Ƭ�� over its competitors on the market because of its “intuitive, easy-to-use interface and clear steps to team-wide implementation,” Turnock said. The LEES team also appreciated the real-time link between their time-sheets and project budget: “Being able to track our work in real-time for our project managers—as well as our principals and owners–has been huge,” she said. The fact that 91��Ƭ��’s time-sheet and project tracking features are easier to use than what the LEES team was using before has made adopting the application easy. “Our admin team loves it, '' she said. “And it’s really helped our resource management, because we’ve put all of our long-term projects in,” she said. “Our schedules change, but at least you can get a snapshot of what’s going on at any given time.”

For Turnock specifically, a few of 91��Ƭ��’s reporting features stood out: “Being able to see our workload actually populated with color-coded percentages and people’s time in there over the next two or three months hit home with me,” she said. “Then, seeing a project budget and the spent-planned-remaining bars and the burn rate chart—it was like, ‘yes, I want that,’” she said.