The what, how and why of project health
- Matt Judd (Deactivated)
- Stacey Quine (Unlicensed)
Written by Stacey Quine, 23 Nov 2022
Where can I find the Project Health tool?
The Project Health tool lives at the top of every project page. You can also find a summary of project health from the Project Dashboard by hovering over the price and hours respectively.
What does it do?
Project Health provides at-a-glance information on project budget and performance.
It’s used to see how you’re tracking during the course of a project, and more importantly, provide us with useful information to help us improve our quoting and processes for the future. We can compare useful metrics, like estimated vs worked hours, review disbursements, and track the project’s hourly rate.
Reference project:
Breakdown of the Project Health tool
Project Health can be understood as having two sections:
the budget section on the left (blue); and
the hours section on the right. (yellow)
The Budget section
Producers are responsible for setting up the budget on the left hand side when they add a project into the VMS.
Project Management: The 10% has been automatically separated from the production costs.
Production Cost: The total production costs added to the project, less the 10% added on top
Disbursements: The value of your disbursements, such as VO or CAD
Total Price: Sum of the above three
The Price section
Both producers and crew are responsible for scheduling and tracking hours.
Estimated hours: These are the hours that we “estimate” it will take our team to complete the pre-production, shooting, editing and animation - it is not the hours “deducted” from a pack or price/275
Scheduled hours: The hours that have been scheduled in the VMS calendar - this will increase as more time is added to the calendar.
Worked hours: The time tracked by crew and producers on pre-production, shooting, editing, animation and changes.
Viewing additional information
You can expand Project Health to see greater detail on the types of hours scheduled and tracked.
OK, but why?
The Hourly Rate. This is the main metric which we can use to quickly and easily gauge a project’s budget performance. It is the production cost divided by the number of hours worked.
(We exclude disbursements, as they are external costs. We also exclude project management as we do not track this time in Harvest.)
We are aiming for between $250-275 an hour at the wrap-up of a project.
A low hourly rate may indicate:
Underquoting
Unbudgeted scope change
Problems in production
Intentional scope increase (going all out)
Miscommunication or some other issue
Training new team members
A much higher hourly rate may indicate:
A project not being finished yet (what is the project status?)
All hours worked not yet tracked
Overquoting
Disbursements not being allocated
It’s important to keep in mind that project hourly rates are NOT a reflection of the performance of producers or anyone else in the team. As you can see above, there are many variables that impact project health. They are there to provide us with information, and in the case of low hourly rates, recognise where all of the time and hard work goes on projects that may not have been quoted or scoped as high as they should have been so we can go after more budget in the future or make important decisions around client retention and strategy.
In order to ensure this hourly rate is as ACCURATE as possible, we must:
Allocate our disbursements correctly so that they are excluded from the hourly rate calculation
Track our time in Harvest
Allocating Disbursements
Add in as much detail as you can at the start of a project
An estimation is fine - you can go back and adjust later
Editing of disbursements is allowed any time for credit projects, and until invoicing for PAYG projects
Include the margin
Tracking time in Harvest
Track all pre-production, location recces and shoots
“Pre-production” is any work spent on creative work or deliverables, such as script writing, storyboards, creative treatments
Time can be tracked in several ways:
via the Project Dashboard
on the Project Health tool from the Project page
via the Harvest app
What about estimated hours?
Estimated hours are added on the project summary page. They are an estimation of the number of hours OUR TEAM will spend on the project. It does not include:
Project Management
Freelancer time
Changes
And it is not just price/275!
Sometimes we’re not quite ready to add in every single shoot and edit when we confirm the project. Estimated hours are a quick and easy way to capture the data we anticipate will go in. We include this as a way to quickly check quotes and assess the accuracy of the project data (for example, if a 20k project has 50 estimated hours, that would usually indicate there are disbursements. A project with 50 estimated hours and only 20 scheduled hours would indicate there are still some shoots or edits to book in).