How Altudo scaled from 200 people to more than 500 thanks to Primetric

Founded in 1999, Altudo has over 600 experts on board who deliver a wide range of services, from Salesforce and Sitecore implementations to cloud computing and mobile development. 

Operating across six offices located in several regions worldwide, Altudo has delivered services to more than 45 Fortune 500 companies from industries spanning financial services, manufacturing, retail, and insurance.

‍The company was Platinum Winner at MarCom Awards (2020) and Hermes Creative Awards (2020) and received the Best User Experience and Visual Design award at Vega Digital Awards (2020).

Primary challenge

The primary challenge Altudo was dealing with was the lack of a holistic view of the company’s people allocation and utilization, combined with a need for more transparency required to reduce the number of meetings about allocating people to projects.

The company was looking for a solution that offered robust reporting capabilities, the ability to create partial allocations, and a single source of truth for all employees.

Thanks to Primetric, Altudo can finally store all the allocation data in one place and share it across the company for better communication, more intelligent planning, and improved employees' utilization.

The problem: Lack of bird’s eye overview and chaotic spreadsheets

Altudo uses the Agile methodology of project management and creates a dedicated team for each collaboration. To plan, allocate, and manage people the company was using a collection of spreadsheets. But this setup brought about a number of issues:

• Lack of a high-level view of employees' availability and utilization - this sometimes led to sub-par people utilization, directly impacting the company’s bottom line due to a more difficult planning process.
• Constant questions from many departments about people’s workload - this resulted in generally poor communication between departments and the need to schedule constant meetings to find out who is busy and for how long.
• Mistakes that caused additional expenses - spreadsheets didn’t allow for a quick check of who could be available for the project. This sometimes resulted in incorrect decisions about additional recruitment (a cost pattern that could have been avoided)
• Team members weren’t on the same page - that’s because they didn’t operate with a single source of truth on people allocation.
• Risk of something not being filled in correctly in Excel - it was leading to many checks in order to ensure the information provided to other managers was correct.
• Report generation was tedious and time-consuming - as it required collecting data from many Excel spreadsheets.
• Difficulties in mapping all of these use cases and processes - partial allocation, easy search by employee skills, and people availability was really hard to implement in spreadsheets.
  

"When I joined the team, we were using Excel-based tools for allocation tracking that didn’t provide us with the information we needed about the availability of our employees. This was the main challenge since our staff may work on several projects at the same time. We had no transparency between managers that led to many problems.”

Kumar Pranay - Practice Lead Quality Assurance at Altudo

Solution: Tool that may support existing processes and allow Altudo to scale faster

Altudo was looking for a solution that would match the following requirements:

• Reporting
• Ability to create partial allocations
• Fast implementation
• Different roles and access options for increasing transparency
• Ability to support various use cases in projects
  

Primetric matched all of these requirements and Altudo decided to implement it. The Primetric team accompanied Altudo at every step of the way, with communication availability via Slack and WhatsApp. 

To personalize Primetric features, the team set up a Trello board dedicated to feature requests where Altudo could track the development of their tailormade functionalities. Finally, Primetric organized a number of workshop meetings to streamline the implementation process and ensure that Altudo could use the full potential of their new people allocation solution from day one.

“We were looking for a tool that would bring us clarity in people allocation and fulfill our specific needs, like enabling us to create partial allocations or generate detailed reports easily. Primetric fulfilled all of our criteria and the implementation process was transparent and smooth thanks to really great support from Primetric. Implementing the solution took just one week, which testifies to the professionalism of the Primetric team." 

Kumar Pranay - Practice Lead Quality Assurance at Altudo

How Altudo is using Primetric

Reporting

Altudo can easily create reports on people allocation and utilization, as well as reports covering billable hours. What’s more, managers can create custom reports and generate forecasts based on the report findings to support their planning activities.

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Reporting is much faster now as it takes a few minutes now to generate a report from Primetric. Thanks to this, Altudo also gained much more clarity in terms of employees' availability.

Allocating people

Managers can create partial allocations that reflect the real-life practices at the company. Moreover, the financial part of Primetric allows keeping all the information about the hourly rates of employees and their skills in one place. This streamlines the process of finding the right people for new projects and matching their skills to project requirements.

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Weekly or bi-weekly allocations are a common occurrence at Altudo. Employees are also often moved from one project to another. Now managers can allocate people to projects confidently, even on a last-minute basis.

Configurable roles and accesses

• Employees can see where/for how long they are allocated to a project. Anytime the allocation changes, they will know about it. They no longer have to reach out to the project manager and engage in long email exchanges about their allocations.
• HR Managers can check the history of an employee's professional development, measure their engagement, or take a look at vacancies that need to be filled in the near future.
• Operations Delivery Managers can quickly understand which specialists will soon be available for projects by taking a look at the company's calendar or reports. They can also check which employees might be overloaded with work and whether there they could be reallocated to other projects.

Altudo’s people allocation processes with Primetric

People allocation for new projects

• When a project appears on the horizon, it also comes with some new requirements; 
• The first step is checking whether Altudo has the right specialists on board;

• If so, the team checks a given person’s availability and hourly rate in relation to the desired profit margin of the project;
• If no employees are available, the team gets in touch with leadership to discuss the requirements and assess its criticality;
• If it’s a high-priority project, the team moves specialists from existing projects;
• But if nobody is available or the project doesn’t have a high priority, the team makes a hiring request to the HR department.

Extending allocation in an existing project

• Sometimes, a project needs to be extended for a few days or even a month;
• The specialists working on it currently need to keep their allocation; 
• Based on their availability in Primetric, the team can update these allocations;
• Reallocation is an option as well - whenever the project manager thinks that the person needs to be reallocated based on the prior planning, the team can reallocate that team member.

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“Our managers finally have the clarity about who is working on which project and for how long. They no longer need to schedule meetings just to update each other about employee's availability. Primetric also helped us to increase the overall level of transparency in the company and provided a single source of truth that each employee can access.”

Kumar Pranay - Practice Lead Quality Assurance

Results

1. Dramatic reduction of waste hours across the organization after the implementation of Primetric - nearly 500 hours a month
2. No more unecessary meetings between different managers struggling to understand which people are available and for how long
3. Access to the bigger picture view of what’s happening at the company
4. No more hiring new employees without visibility into which specialists are required
5. No administrative work related to multiple Excel spreadsheets 
6. Robust reporting features that allow generating accurate reports on people availability and utilization, or billable hours
7. Very fast implementation within 7 days (a process that usually takes a lot of time and becomes a problem for large companies)
8. Much faster reporting and controling - availability reports generated in a matter of minutes

Next steps

Altudo has been using primetric for over a 2 years now. During that time, it has grown 3x.

The company is planning to implement a financial module soon to better estimate projects and track project portfolio profitability.

"I remember that when they started implementing Primetric, they had over 200 people on board. Since then, Altudo has grown to over 500 employees, and it's still growing. That is impressive, and we are happy that we can support their journey."

Arkadiusz Terpilowski - Co-founder at Primetric

Result? Dramatic reduction of waste hours across the organization after the implementation of Primetric - the Altudo team now saves nearly 500 hours per month!

Interested? Book a demo to learn more about how Primetric could help your business.