”When new work comes in, we have the right people, ready to go. Winning work and protecting the team, we never have to choose just one.” How often can you confidently say the same? Facing resourcing questions about upcoming projects can sound simple, but if your schedules are built on assumptions and capacity is only estimated, face it, your resource planning is under-engineered!

Novigi has an impressive story. Since launching in 2016, they’ve scaled to 550 staff across six offices and two countries, while becoming the fastest-growing professional services firm on the AFR Fast 100 - their story is worth studying.

Your sales pipeline and marketing funnel are important as a source of leads and revenue, but the real driver of growth for your consulting firm may be from an unexpected source: effective resource planning. Building an efficient lead-to-close system will drive revenue, but if you can’t deliver the work efficiently and profitably, your firm isn’t actually growing; it’s just getting more busy.

As a consulting firm owner, knowing your cash flow position is crucial for operations. Typically, you get a clear sense of your cash flow at the end of the month, when all of your invoices are ready to send out. But in the middle of the month, you are operating in the dark. And what about three months from now?

It’s hard to tell if March felt too short or too long but we’ve squeezed an impactful update into the final weeks of Q1 for you! From improvements to time logging, subscription details and sync history, here’s what’s new in the Projectworks platform - your all-in-one PSA software for project intelligence.

Every consulting firm reaches a point in their growth journey where using spreadsheets to track hours and expenses becomes a liability. Especially as your staff and client work increases, cracks in your processes begin to form.

Sick of seeing your meetings in your calendar and wishing they'd just magically port over to your timesheet? Well, now they can! We've launched our latest integration with Microsoft Outlook, so you can see your calendar events in your Projectworks timesheet, and easily assign them to your timecodes.

Many consulting firms look healthy from the outside, yet behind the scenes everything is only just holding together. Often the problem comes down to operational infrastructure that isn’t fit for purpose. Common examples include everything still depending on a small number of people, leadership teams avoiding the elephant in the room, and the firm’s Founder being the only source of new business. Sound a little too close to home? Read on, or watch the latest episode of the Projectworks Podcast below.

Of the many hats you wear as the owner of a growing consulting firm, perhaps the most time-consuming one is “data-wrangler”.

Most founders think about consulting M&A backwards – they think the game starts when a buyer turns up, when in fact it actually starts years earlier, in how you build the firm.

In the early stages of your consulting firm’s practice, tracking billable hours with spreadsheets was good enough. Your focus was on delivering high-quality work, and your relationship with your clients operated on implicit trust.

As a consulting firm owner, your “rockstar” consultant – the one who handles the most complex projects and requires the least amount of oversight – is actually your biggest flight risk. And not because they are in such high demand; but because they are so good at what they do, they are “first call” on projects, and that can lead to burnout if their billable hours are not planned and managed carefully.

For many consulting firm owners, the end of the month means sending invoices, and waiting on the inevitable emails from your clients’ finance department requesting clarification. Common requests include a breakdown of hours on a specific phase of the project, or additional detail on a task that went over the estimated hours.

Winning work is getting harder for a simple reason: the shape of demand has changed. In the episode, we unpack what we’re seeing in Projectworks data, and what it means for proposals, margins, and your delivery team’s sanity.

Receiving a phone call from a client about an invoice is one of the more dreaded moments in consulting. You are not only being put on the defensive about work you performed on their behalf, you have to answer questions while trying to recall a specific meeting that occurred weeks ago, or the details of a complex revision that added time to the project scope. Worst of all, your relationship with the client started deteriorating the moment they saw the invoice. So, in addition to justifying your billable hours, you have to make up for the “trust gap” and rebuild your relationship.

Did anyone else’s February fly by? It’s mid Q1 and we are only ramping up with all of the value and new features we’re bringing you in Projectworks. This month we celebrating SOC 2 compliance as well as a new Outlook calendar integration and multi-organisation support for HubSpot users. Read to the end for your free guide to growing profitably in 2026!

We're proud to share that Projectworks has recently received its first SOC 2® report on our security controls. It's a milestone we've been working toward for some time, and one that means a lot to us not only as a business achievement, but as a reflection of the trust our customers place in us day to day with their data!

Boutique consulting firms depend on careful planning and scheduling to grow their business. Project start and end dates are set to ensure that certain resources are available to start on a new project immediately after the completion of the current project. The limited size of their “bench” – resources available but not assigned – means that project plans must be airtight and utilization consistently high.

In consulting, billable hour adjustments often happen at the end of the billing cycle, when the amount of hours actually worked exceeds what is reasonably expected by the client. Those hours are usually just dropped from the invoice silently, while work for the next billing cycle ramps up.

When a new RFP lands in your inbox, your primary thought is, “How do we win this business?” After all, new business is the lifeblood of any growing consulting firm, and there is no growth without new business.

Learn how resource planning software like Projectworks provides the forecasting data you need to know exactly when to hire your next consultant and protect your margins.

Consulting firm growth does not slow down politely. It hits a wall. One month you are humming, the next you are swamped with work but somehow moving slower.

Learn how modern time tracking software like Projectworks helps consultants capture every billable minute, increasing your firm’s revenue and profitability.

Discover the 5 common billing mistakes that cause clients to delay payment and how invoicing software like Projectworks solves them.

Most consulting firms grow by default. Fewer grow by design. That distinction matters more than many leaders realise, especially if the goal is to build a firm that attracts a strong revenue multiple. In the first episode of Season two of The Projectworks Podcast, Mark Orttung and Dominique Rennell introduced the Growth Maturity Model they are developing to help consulting leaders answer a hard but necessary question: is your firm actually built in a way someone else would want to buy it?

Learn how resource planning software like Projectworks can help you visualize resource availability and maximize your firm’s utilization.

Learn how PSA software integrates automated time tracking and resource management to help you scale your business and make more money.

Learn how rounding down hours on your timesheets leads to lost revenue and why switching to dedicated time tracking software is the solution.

Are spreadsheets holding your firm back? Here are 5 signs your consulting business has outgrown manual spreadsheets and needs dedicated time tracking software like Projectworks.

Happy New Year! To kick things off, we're sharing our new, smoother connection between Schedule, Resourcing, and Forecasting. Plus, do you use our QuickBooks Online or HubSpot integrations? We've added new QBO classes and enabled HubSpot Line Items to create Budgets in Projectworks, saving you valuable billable time.

Learn how assigning work to whoever is available rather than who is best suited to the work hurts your margins, and how resource planning software addresses this issue.

Learn how automated invoicing software for consultants reduces Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) and improves cash flow.

Learn how to calculate the daily cost of unassigned consultants and how to optimize your resources for higher profits.

Learn how using PSA software instead of spreadsheets will increase the profitability and efficiency of your consulting business.

The IT staffing industry is changing fast. Slowing tech hiring, tighter procurement controls, increased MSP involvement, and rapid advances in AI are forcing staffing firms to rethink their business models and their path into IT consulting. The reality is, although most staffing firms want to develop a consulting/ SOW arm, only a small percentage of firms who set out to do it, will find success.

Discover the psychology behind billing transparency, why detailed invoices build trust, and how automated invoicing software helps strengthen relationships with your clients.

Engineering expertise. Clear visibility. Confident planning.

January is often a time of planning, strategizing, and envisioning after a season of reflection. You might be wondering what it will take to get to the next level of growth with your consulting firm… especially in a time where AI can rather fuel your dreams, or overcomplicate and slow you down.

Happy holidays from all of us here at Projectworks! It's the final Product Update of the year, and it's a big one.

MBB Group is a high-growth independent advisory business, with a reputation for solving some of Australia’s toughest infrastructure challenges. As Australia’s infrastructure pipeline began to scale rapidly, so too did MBB’s team of energy, transport, water, mining, defence, logistics, and social infrastructure experts.

AEC firms win around half of the bids they submit, according to the Inspire Report. Competing in this environment is tough. You need to pitch more often just to maintain the same pipeline, and those pitches need to be sharper than ever.

When Queensland’s Projectick outgrew its old systems, it needed software that worked as hard as its projects do.

Great delivery starts with great project and resource planning - and professional services firms know that commercial success depends on aligning people, time, and priorities.

When I first became CEO of consulting firm Nexient, things felt stuck. We were doing a lot of $100k, $200k, $500k projects, and were just stuck at a wall between $30M and $40M in revenue.

In this live webinar with our customers NGNU and Red Fox Advisory on Mega Projects & The Road Ahead for Australia's Engineers we brought together the directors of engineering and consulting firms to unpack what's changing, what isn't, and what their firms are doing to maximise chances of success going into 2026. Below, we share key insights from the webinar.

Discover 5 key takeaways from Projectworks CEO Mark Orttung on how AI and automation can accelerate engineering consultancy growth during the UK’s £725 billion infrastructure boom.

We’re entering the holiday season, but we’re still hard at work pushing out new features in Projectworks so you can start 2026 ready to crush your projects, margin, and growth goals. We focused on integration improvements in December, with the additional bonus of a totally refreshed user interface - clean, consistent, and modern, so you can manage your projects even more smoothly.

Nonprofit. Nationwide reach. Real transformation.

We doubled billable rates at consulting firm Nexient during my tenure as CEO - but it took us 7 years. In hindsight we could have lifted prices so much faster with a Professional Services Automation tool. Instead we had our field team.

If you signed a big client tomorrow at your current rates, would you be happy to live with that pricing for the next three years? Most consulting leaders I speak to quietly admit the answer is no. Wage costs have jumped, client expectations have shifted, and yet rate cards still reflect a world from two or three years ago.

Projectworks hosted its first virtual conference, SHIFT, for high growth US software consulting firms looking to think strategically about how they integrate AI into their internal systems, inspire culture, and standing out in 2026. Below you can catch the replay’s and key predictions from software consulting leaders.

In a year shaped by AI, Software Services Firms and IT Consultancies across the United States are in a widespread reinvention moment. In this guide we break down how firms are navigating the shift, and what strategies are fuelling growth for small and mid sized firms.

Across Australian Architects in 2025, the brief kept getting wider while timelines stayed tight. Clients asked for cooler streets, better shade and movement, water capture and reuse, clear Country pathways, early biodiversity checks and build-ability in view. The studios that grew recognised the pressure early, set clearer scope lines and ran a calmer delivery engine that made decisions weekly instead of monthly.

We’re excited to announce that Projectworks is a proud sponsor of TechFest 2025, taking place November 27th in London.

In 2025 for the Engineering Sector down under, pipeline was the conversation irrespective of what side of the ditch your firm sat on. In Australia the pipeline grew quickly across energy, transport, water and social infrastructure. However, turning that momentum into consistent, profitable delivery was still hard for many firms. In New Zealand the public pipeline only became visible toward the end of the year. It was a tougher run, and leaders had to think differently about growth. The firms that moved ahead in both markets built a high performance delivery engine and ran it with calm discipline, thanks to visibility of all key project and business profitability metrics.

As 2025 nears its conclusion, we’ve taken stock of all we’ve heard in conversation with Engineering Consultancies across the UK – and what made the difference for firms that grew.

Discover how integrating Salesforce with your professional services automation software helps consulting firms streamline delivery, manage resources, track time & expenses, and improve invoicing accuracy.

It's never been easier to pump out a bland pitch - thanks ChatGPT. Unless your firm’s strategy is to be the cheapest offer on the table, here are five things your pitch will need to do to win in 2026, in order to win.

We’re excited to announce the opening of our new office in London, England, marking a major milestone in our continued global growth.

Do you run a software services consultancy? Maybe you’re a delivery lead and struggling to track your employees' time accurately? If so, you probably know the pain of chasing timesheets, patching data together across tools, or realizing - too late - that your project burn has outpaced your budget.

The team was excited to find out that Projectworks has been named a finalist in the 2025 Xero App Awards 2025 last week - celebrating our mission to unleash experts on the real work!

Below is a practical 5-step guide to getting off the feast-and-famine roller coaster and building durable profit, healthy teams, and happier clients.

Most firms treat utilization like a thermostat. Too cold, crank it up. Too hot, hope nobody burns out. The reality is messier. Hours leak in the handoffs, decisions drift, heroes hoard the hard work, and a quiet three-week gap nukes a quarter.

When competitors compare, accuracy matters. Recently, our friends over at ROLL published a page inviting people to “switch from Projectworks” and implying that Projectworks is little more than a timesheet tracker. We love a bit of competition between professional services tools - but not when fiction replaces fact! So, let’s clear the air and have a little fun while we’re at it 😉👇

Can you believe we're already well into Q4? The Projectworks team has been hard at work pushing to make this quarter our most impactful yet.

If your project and resource management lives in spreadsheets, everyone feels the drag - including your profits. Proposals wobble because you’re guessing who’s free. Delivery slips because project planning isn’t keeping up with project realities. Some teams are overloaded while others wait for work. It’s frustrating, it’s expensive - and it’s fixable.

Leading a consulting firm can feel less like a job, and more like walking a tightrope - just when you’ve found the perfect balance between people, projects and profits, something shifts, and the resource management planning juggle starts again.

If you run a growing consulting firm, you know the pattern. A client pulls a date forward, a senior consultant is out sick, two proposals land at once, and suddenly your day is spent putting out project resource management fires.

Running a streamlined consultancy is hard. Demand is lumpy, teams are distributed, clients expect speed, and delivery costs keep pressure on margins. Here are the Top 6 project resource management mistakes consulting firms make every day - and 6 fast fixes that’ll protect your firm’s profit and wellbeing.

The Projectworks user interface (UI) changed in November 2025.

Professional Services Automation software enables professional services organizations to effectively manage their consultants and drive profitable project delivery.

Firm struggling to make a profit, despite your team always feeling slammed? You’re living the classic project resource management paradox - here’s 8 ways to escape it.

For consulting firms, the invoice is more than a receipt, it is the moment revenue becomes cash. The last mile often slips: wrong entity, inconsistent branding, unclear breakdowns, or formatting that stalls in AP. Invoice templates fix this at the root: design once, apply everywhere, and generate professional invoices your clients approve on the first pass.

When a new project lands, the brief is clear, but your team capacity isn’t. Do you staff from a stretched bench, hire contractors, or push the start date? Smart firms use resource management software to model demand up-front with placeholder resources – so you can commit with confidence, protect margin, and avoid last-minute scrambles.

When it comes to time tracking, no-one needs another “where to click” tutorial. The real challenge is creating a daily habit that gives you clean, connected data – so you staff smarter, bill faster, and catch risk early. Here’s a practical approach to consulting time tracking used by high-performing firms, with examples of how teams run it in Projectworks.

It’s Monday. An RFP lands. Someone asks who can lead it next month. Silence. Spreadsheets open, calendars are scanned, and the best guess wins. It’s gut-feel resourcing, rather than resource management planning, and it’s eroding your profits.

In this article, we uncover 6 hidden ways poor time and expense tracking can bleed profit - and how modern time tracking software like Projectworks can plug the gaps.

Together with our industry partners, ACE New Zealand, we had over 90 engineering leaders from across Aotearoa register to attend a conversation about the commercial and operational calls leaders are making to steer their firms through 2025 and position for work expected in 2026.

Most consulting execs think the biggest challenge in scaling is sales. It isn’t. Or at least, it isn’t only sales. The real challenge is scaling both pipelines at once – revenue and talent. If you grow one without the other, you break. Sales without delivery capacity shatters trust. Talent without sales leaves people on the bench and drains morale.

Every consulting leader I speak to is feeling it: the clock’s ticking. You’ve got to hit the numbers, deliver the projects, win the work - and on top of all that, get ahead of the AI wave before it wipes your firm out. Spoiler alert — I don’t have all the AI answers, or a five-step playbook. What I do have is a ton of trial and error, and some lightbulb moments from Episode 03’s Z Suite conversation with bdna COO Karyn Smith.

Scaling a consulting firm isn’t theory for us - it’s lived experience. We've developed a play-by-play cheat sheet that comes from years of leading and growing firms through every messy, exhilarating stage of the journey. We've made every mistake along the way, which means you don’t have to.

I thought growing a consulting firm would be like stacking bricks. Turns out, it’s more like juggling knives. It’s risky. It’s messy. It’s thrilling. And it can cut you if you’re not careful. In Episode 02 of the Z Suite, Groundline GM Kyle James and I wrestled with the five things growth breaks fastest - and how to growth-proof them.

We’ve made building budgets in Projectworks simpler and more flexible. A solid project budget helps you understand project performance by comparing projected burn to your budget and projected revenue. This stops you from overspending and maximizes your project margins - and your impact.

Across geographies and disciplines, the firms that thrive share one thing: they run their businesses with clarity. And that clarity comes from tracking and acting on five core metrics. These metrics are not just numbers, they are the heartbeat of growth-ready firms.

AI may be dominating headlines, but the real story for software consultancies is delivery discipline. Firms that can’t run lean, predictable operations will not survive this transition.

Demand is surging, but people are stretched to breaking point. Retention is shaky, hiring is hard, and gaps in training are widening. For many Australian firms, the biggest risk is no longer the pipeline, it’s the talent needed to deliver it.

Compliance has always been part of architecture. But in today’s Australia, it has become the single biggest source of risk for firms. From bushfire codes to accessibility mandates, regulation is evolving faster than many firms can keep up.

The biggest obstacle to growth in New Zealand’s engineering industry is not investment, it’s talent. After years of layoffs and stalled projects, the workforce is thin. Young graduates aren’t entering fast enough, and experienced engineers are harder than ever to retain.

The UK’s engineering industry is brimming with opportunity, but firms are running headfirst into a structural challenge: the skills shortage. Skilled professionals are thin on the ground, and rising costs make hiring even tougher. The result? Many consultancies are trying to do more with less, often at the expense of margins and client trust.

AI is fundamentally reshaping how software services are delivered, valued, and priced. Across North America, software consultancies are confronting a new reality: clients want more strategic value, new competitors are emerging, and delivery models are being reinvented in real time.

Australia’s engineering moment has arrived. But opportunity without control is a recipe for missed deadlines, shrinking margins, and reputational risk. The firms that win will be the ones that lead with structure, not scramble with spreadsheets.

The Australian architecture industry is entering a new chapter, one defined by urban intensification, climate adaptation, and rising compliance demands. For firms, the stakes have never been higher. The work matters more than ever, but it has also never been harder to deliver with control.

New Zealand’s engineering sector stands on the edge of both extraordinary potential and significant risk. The consultancies that invest now, in clarity, control, and operational maturity, will be tomorrow’s leaders.

For small and mid-sized engineering consultancies in the UK, the difference between leading the next decade and being left behind comes down to readiness, operational discipline, and the ability to deliver under unprecedented pressure.

I thought selling a consulting firm would be like landing a big project. Turns out, it’s nothing like that. It’s emotional. It’s messy. It’s six months of all-consuming work. In Episode 01 of Z Suite Live, I swapped M&A battle stories with Allen Debes, CEO of Koniag Capital. We've pulled together the five things we wish we’d known before our first deal. It’s not a corporate M&A manual. It’s a founder’s cheatsheet you can use tomorrow. Steal it. Use it. Tell me how it goes.

Growing a consultancy sounds exciting. In reality, it often feels like holding everything together with spreadsheets, shared drives, and late-night phone calls. That was where Scendea, a specialist biotech consultancy, found themselves in 2020. They were delivering world-class regulatory and product development support to life sciences clients, but their internal systems weren’t keeping up. Budgets were in Excel. Timesheets in ClickTime. Resourcing happened through phone calls. It got them by for a while, but it wasn’t sustainable — and it certainly wasn’t going to get them where they wanted to go.

We’re excited to share that Projectworks has earned 36 badges in the G2 Summer 2025 Reports, with standout placements across categories like Project Management, Professional Services Automation, Resource Management, and more.

In July, we enhanced margin reporting and expanded our customer review program. Plus - since its release in June, 35% of Projectworks users have explored the new custom reporting engine. Have you tried it yet? We’d love to hear what you think.

This guide explores the common challenges of resource allocation and offers practical tips to help you plan better, avoid bottlenecks, and keep your projects on track with resource management software.