You might not be familiar with the term, but workforce intelligence is certainly something all architecture and design (A&D) firms rely on. At its core, workforce intelligence is the transformation of project and people data into visual reports that inform decision-making. 

Workforce intelligence can be viewed as a specialty subset of business intelligence (BI). Standard BI tools are meant to serve any business or function, and they require a great deal of effort to set up and customize. Managing BI platforms typically requires a data analyst to understand and distribute the results. This is an expense of time and money that most A&D firms can’t afford, and creates a disconnect with the people who can act on the data. 

That’s where Mosaic’s workforce intelligence software comes in, helping A&D firms understand their business and workforce without data analysts, months of setup, and exorbitant costs. Mosaic provides pre-built, highly visual reports to answer common industry questions like what’s our workload? Do we need to hire? What skills do we need to hire for? What are our profit and loss sectors? and much more. And because Mosaic integrates with ERPs and financial software, reporting is instant and up to date without any double data entry. 

Let’s look at some examples of our workforce intelligence and how these reports benefit firms. 

1. Workload Report

How do you know if everyone has enough work for the next quarter? Who needs more work and who’s at risk of burning out? Is it balanced across all teams? Which departments are slow? Mosaic answers all of these questions in the Workload Report, which shows you how much work your team has over any time period. 

Having greater visibility into workload and ensuring staff members are always busy will significantly improve your utilization—without people working overtime. Mosaic does this by getting more people into the work planning conversation, so everyone as a group can triage deadlines and make sure everyone always has something to do. 

Mosaic even analyzes all of your firm’s people and project data to suggest work for people when they’re free, ensuring everyone is always busy with the right work— further boosting utilization and profit. We have seen such strong improvements that now we guarantee it. Use Mosaic to strategically plan your workforce, and it will increase your utilization a minimum of 3% or your money back. 

2. Workload and Billing Forecasts

It’s hard to do business planning when you don’t know what the revenue will be for the next quarter. But determining how much upcoming work firms have is a challenging process. And it’s often what keeps leadership up at night. Mosaic solves this struggle with another essential piece of workforce intelligence: Workload Forecasting. Mosaic looks at dozens of data points—including historical project, planning, budget, and invoicing data—to accurately predict workload, so you can confidently plan the next quarter and beyond. It’s certainty in an uncertain world.

3. Demand Analysis

Mosaic uses workload to inform hiring with our Demand Analysis. As a business leader, you constantly need to have your finger on the pulse of whether there’s too much work and you need to hire, or not enough work and you need to bring in more. Decide too late and you have staff working overtime to get projects delivered. Hire too early and you have people on the bench, not billing their time. 

Mosaic makes the decision clear by comparing the upcoming demand for each role against the capacity of staff in those roles. It then shows you when the work backlog is not enough to keep staff busy (indicating that you may need to chase more proposals or assist another team), or when demand exceeds capacity and you need to hire. Mosaic can even offer specific recommendations, like “Hire a project manager in the next 60 days.” Mosaic then takes it a step further, offering the strengths and weaknesses of that project manager role, which brings us to our next report. 

4. Skills Report

So, if you do need to hire, how do you determine which skills you should look for in your candidate? Typically, managers aren’t sure which roles they need to hire or which skills hires need to have until they’re deep into the hiring process. It’s impossible to assess without the right tool. Now there’s Mosaic to review the skills of your current staff, identify skill gaps, and suggest which skills you need to look for as part of your hiring efforts. 

You can also use this report to identify opportunities to upskill and train your current team.

5. Utilization Report

If you’re billing time, utilization rate—or the distribution of time spent on billable vs. non-billable time—is an important metric. Utilization rate is a simple calculation, but getting an accurate and visual report that anyone can easily understand at a glance is another story. 

It can be challenging to extract that data from your ERP and then distribute a report to the people who need to see it—all before plans change. Mosaic’s utilization report is tailored to A&D, and teams can easily modify it to view utilization by discipline, department, role, and the entire organization over any time period. 

You can also set goal utilization rates and track performance throughout the year, and view the historic trends on utilization. In this report, you can see for yourself Mosaic’s impact on the firm’s profit through increased utilization. 

6. Variance Analysis

One thing we’ve learned building a planning tool is that the majority of people are overly optimistic planners; they assume that things take a lot less time than they actually do. While that optimism is useful elsewhere in life, it can quickly get you in trouble when planning projects. If you’re always underestimating how long a project will take, the work never gets completed on time and throws off all of your plans. Not to mention your project will probably go over budget. 

Mosaic gives you visual variance analysis for work plans, budget, and schedules. When you’re creating a new project proposal, you can quickly bring up several completed projects of similar scope and compare the difference to your original plans to see how much time was actually spent on the project. Mosaic’s AI also automatically helps you adjust your plans from past performance, suggesting that a similar project has exceeded schedule or budget in the past. Mosaic’s Variance Analysis will increase the accuracy of your future plans. 

You can even drill down to a specific time period to see how things are progressing against the plan, or see how a specific person is tracking against their planned time. 

7. Profit & Loss Report

Some of the most important information to have is which projects are most profitable and which projects lose money. With Mosaic’s Profit & Loss Report, you can view this information by department, client, market sector, project manager, or executive-in-charge to identify trends and opportunities for improved pricing of work. You can even drill down to understand which projects and phases are the most profitable. 

This report also helps you identify where the complexities are in scope, so you can carve it out as an additional service. For example, you might not currently charge much for code analysis work, but Mosaic can show that your staff spends considerable time on it, so you can avoid doing future pro bono work. You can discover where you can best compete and where you can specialize to avoid the steep cost of education and training. 

Mosaic even looks back at past performance through our software integrations, including your financial software or ERP, to help you learn from your firm’s entire history. 

8. Dashboards

We’ve touched on a lot of reports in this article, and while they’re all excellent sources of information, what good are they if no one sees them? Mosaic’s dashboards present summaries of reports in a clean, visual display. For executives, it’s the kind of visibility they’ve always dreamed of.

With Mosaic, you can easily build out individual, department, and executive dashboards for easy access to always up-to-date reports, like workload, utilization, demand, variance, profit, time, and much more. There are dozens of combinations of dashboards you can create and customize in minutes. 

Dashboards also are easily shareable across the organization, disseminating information to the people who can actually take action on it. All levels of management can have a high-level summary of everything that’s important to them. 

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As these eight examples of workforce intelligence demonstrate, Mosaic tells you everything you and your team need to know about your people and projects. Our reporting is easily digestible to anyone; everyone gets the visibility into the business that they need to succeed.

Mosaic provides the data transparency to empower managers and leadership to manage the firm with confidence and make the right decisions for long-term success. It provides the workforce intelligence they need to effectively plan next quarter and beyond. No more operating week-to-week; no more making decisions in the dark. 

Of course, dashboards and reporting are only a small part of the features Mosaic offers. You can learn about our full resource management and workforce intelligence software at mosaicapp.com.

About Mosaic

Launched in 2018, Mosaic is the only AI-powered resource management and workforce intelligence software that enables real-time collaboration for planning work. 

Harnessing the power of AI and automation, Mosaic provides resource planning, reporting, and forecasting. Integrating with project management, financial, and ERP software, Mosaic automatically gathers, organizes, and analyzes data to deliver complete business visibility in one intuitive interface. 

Mosaic rescues teams from clunky spreadsheets and disconnected tools. We guarantee that we’ll boost productivity and profitability, and we provide a free 30-day trial to prove it. 

Learn more and book a personalized demonstration at mosaicapp.com.