White Papers

As organizations and managers find themselves with two feet planted firmly in a fully interconnected, truly global economy, one truth is evident for all enterprises—and particularly for project-driven businesses that rely heavily on project teams and information workers:

There is an old adage that says business is like a car; it won’t run by itself except downhill. Yet when it comes to arguably the most important element of business — Human Capital — many enterprises are not fully in the driver's seat. They use outdated top-down manual systems, or simple spreadsheets, to get the right people to the right place at the right time.

This white paper explains why EVA is important in the project planning process, illustrates by example how it works, and describes the tools and metrics needed by project managers to both perform EVA and to utilize its results effectively.

Centralized, formalized, and audited work processes substantially improve the efficiencies, decision making ability, and ultimately the performance of any organization. This guide presents an overview of the key processes that directly and indirectly impact project and service delivery. The objective is to show how Business Process Management (BPM) concepts, when applied to Project Management, provide an organization with a more effective and predictable strategy for project management and operational control.

A common pain of business managers in a variety of enterprises is the proliferation of spreadsheet-based reports and tracking that hit customers and business units with a blizzard of assorted and often conflicting data. Disconnected or manually integrated systems, a mish-mash of unapproved data, and a wild email exchange of spreadsheets leads to an environment that is ripe for revenue leakage, errors, fraud and systemic control weaknesses. Tenrox leverages the Microsoft Platform to provide a powerful and affordable alternative to this state of disarray.

Writing on competitive advantages in his seminal work, “Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors,” famed business scholar Michael Porter notes, “There is less to fear from outside competition than from inside inefficiency.” In other words, companies should first “look within” to do what they do with efficient excellence before “looking without” to competitive moves.

Nowhere in business is the Benjamin Franklin adage, “Well done is better than well said,” more apt than in services organizations. While buyers delighted with products may forgive a company for glitches experienced in obtaining them, customers buying services will not. The experience is the service. Strategic plans, implementation roadmaps and performance objectives are meaningless without the timely and effective delivery of the services promised.

Project-related costs account for a significant percentage of overall IT and product development budgets. Projects have the highest risk of experiencing a variety of threats and challenges. Therefore, understanding and addressing project and portfolio threats has to be at the core of any company's compliance and governance initiative.

Time and billing applications are used in professional services organizations such as legal, engineering, accounting and hi-tech consulting firms where detailed time and expenses are tracked and billed to specific customers. Time and billing software is used when there is little to no product inventory to sell and maintain.

This guide serves as an introduction to time and billing software, the benefits of implementing it, and what you need to prepare for and deploy such a solution in your organization.

In his quintessential guide to personal and financial success Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill tells the story of an entrepreneur who gained unprecedented success in the insurance industry through a lesson he learned by failing in the gold mining business. In his younger days, this man had failed to turn a profit in his gold mining company because he had given up in dismay, not realizing that he had stopped his drills just three feet from striking one of the richest gold veins to later be found in California. Never again did he let himself “stop three feet from gold.”

In a commercial contract, the deliverable is a package of goods and services. In a government contract, there's another ingredient for the contractor to reckon with: administrative reporting to assure that costs billed to the contract are allowable by the government. In this sense, “reporting” means not only routinely submitted reports such as detailed justification for contract billing, but also the ability to produce on-demand responses to government auditors' requests for information.

To encourage innovation and stimulate R&D activity in Canada, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) provides the Scientific Research and Exploratory Development (SR&ED) program. This program offers significant investment tax credits to businesses of any size and in any sector that develop new, improved, or technologically advanced products or processes within Canada.

The number of project-based organizations/departments continues to increase, and newly formed Project Management Offices (PMOs) are introduced daily. Now, more than ever, Project Managers are forced to build stronger ties to the financial operations within any project-oriented business or department that must adhere to Sarbanes-Oxley and/or its equivalent in countries across the world.

Corporate governance laws, state/federal labor laws, and accounting regulations are making companies and their executives even more accountable for transparent, true and timely project portfolio, labor and financial reporting. Regulatory and oversight bodies such as the SEC, demanding and extremely cautious audit firms and nervous shareholders, now point the finger directly at the company's senior executives and hold them personally and criminally accountable for the company's accurate reporting on operations and any control weaknesses.

This whitepaper lists potential errors and fraud scenarios. It recommends a set of fraud and error detection reports that will help your organization achieve sustainable compliance for timesheet management.

California wage laws are presenting a new challenge to employers. There are increasing occurrences of lawsuit cases, from current or former employees, pertaining to claims of unpaid wages that in some cases are rightfully due to them.

A time tracking solution that supports California wage laws can be a very wise investment.