GCS improves accountability across every department with Klipfolio

GCS Technologies is an Austin-based managed services provider that helps organizations with IT needs, infrastructure, and cloud implementation.

Meet Eric

Eric Granger is Director of Implementations and Development at GCS. He manages the Advanced Technical Services (ATS) team and leads internal development for products and services sold to their customers. He's been with GCS for over five years.

Eric's days are filled with internal meetings — aligning objectives with committees and stakeholders, and working on collaborative approaches for the organization. When he's not in meetings, he's focused on customer-facing project work. The ATS team starts every day with a morning scrum, where each technician reviews the day's work and flags anything that needs help.

Taking spreadsheets to the next level

Previously, ATS team reporting lived across a collection of spreadsheets that tracked the company's various KPIs. Alongside those, they used ConnectWise reporting to process and display data as best they could. The problem: data was scattered across sources, making it hard to spot and resolve inconsistencies in tracking.

GCS needed a single place to aggregate their data sources and display KPIs across every level of the organization. Eric and his team evaluated several tools before landing on Klips.

"When we discovered Klipfolio we were pleased with all the various integration options as well as the opportunity to visualize every data set we needed to track KPIs at every level of the organization."

How soon can we get this customer's project started?

Eric's team now uses Klips in several ways. Their primary dashboard tracks monthly and quarterly progress toward revenue goals.

Eric also built a Klip called the "Heap" — a component within the team dashboard that uses multiple tables and widgets built on modelled data sources to calculate and display project team capacity, lead time, and backlog.

"Klipfolio is used by our team leads and execs to answer the questions 'How soon can we get this customer's project started?' and 'Is the project team actually busy?'"

GCS also maintains a dashboard for individual team member metrics, including effective hours per week (utilization) and remaining effort on active projects, broken down by project type with billable hours remaining.

Tracking impactful cross-departmental KPIs

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that shows how effectively a company is achieving its key business objectives. Organizations use KPIs to evaluate progress toward targets.

The right KPIs depend on your industry and which part of the business you're measuring. Each department tracks different metrics based on its specific goals.

At GCS:

• The NOC and Service teams track ticket volume and completed service tickets
• The project team tracks revenue based on billed hours
• The sales team tracks closed opportunity margins, generally set by quarterly quotas

"My personal favorite Klip is the 'Project Team Heap' — mostly because it was the first one that I made all on my own."

The Project Team Heap gives the team an at-a-glance view of how busy each technician is, how much backlog exists, and how healthy or unhealthy the sales pipeline looks as a whole.

It also breaks down project types by contract structure, which directly affects profitability. Fixed fee projects are generally more desirable to Eric's team because they create the potential for under-budget revenue, which incentivizes efficiency and reduces project defects.

"Before we had access to Klips, we had to pull reports and dig through spreadsheets. Now, with Klipfolio we just take a glance at our dashboards. Everything is there, automated and aggregated."

Using data to promote cross-departmental accountability

Klips has increased accountability across every department at GCS by making team and individual performance indicators visible in near real-time.

More specifically, Eric can now track and observe trends in financials like AR, backlog, and deferred revenue — giving his team the visibility needed to forecast capacity and maintain what they call the "health of the tribe."

"We have been able to turn insights into sales opportunities with Klipfolio."

Most company dashboards are accessible via published links and displayed across multiple monitors in their network operations centre. Additional monitors are positioned throughout the office, above cubicle work areas.

"My favorite thing about Klipfolio is 'The Struggle' — a good kind of struggle. One that comes with trying to get a component (table, chart, or gauge) to work in a way I could only imagine it to. Usually, I make my way towards an epiphany by playing around with all the customizations and layout settings. The thrill of the 'A-HA' moment becomes addicting and makes me want to figure out more ways to find and display data."

A "Do No Harm" culture with beer and private karaoke

"Our philosophy is 'Do no harm'; leave environments better than you found them."

GCS places a strong cultural emphasis on craftsmanship, with a focus on improving the reliability and performance of every technology build they deliver.

"The strength of our commitments and the length of our relationships create a 'Chosen Family' dedicated to mutual success and fulfillment. We enjoy what we do and who we do it with."

Eric and his team celebrate that culture outside the office, too — camping trips, river tubing, and the occasional round of pitch and putt golf with an ice chest in tow.

"When we're feeling really saucy, you might catch us getting a private karaoke room and letting it all out."

Eric's parting advice for people who are new to Klipfolio

"Don't be afraid to reach out to Klipfolio's support team! They will help you 'figure it out' or get to the bottom of what you're trying to see. They have some of the brightest folks I have encountered on their team. Also, check if the apps you use have APIs. You can connect them to Klipfolio and create real-time visualizations (vs. manually updating spreadsheets)."