Making accurate estimates and avoiding project cost overruns: A success story with Rancho BioSciences

What sets apart a company that is competent in project management and one that does it exceptionally well? Well, there are lots of things, but knowing how to avoid cost overruns in project execution and accurately estimate project costs is certainly one path to take.

Nobody wants to deal with miscalculated estimates or project cost overruns. For project managers, this is a tell-tale sign that something is broken internally.

Still, when managing projects, it’s only normal that you run into your fair share of project complexity errors. But what can you do to ensure that project cost overruns are at a minimum and that your estimates are as accurate as possible? A project time tracking tool has the power to help you navigate complex project budgeting situations, keeping you in the loop with real-time project status and letting you know if things are starting to go off track.

What makes project estimation and budgeting so difficult?

To effectively estimate the budget and resources needed for a project, you need to wrangle with various moving pieces. Apart from the set amount of money or time you have to complete a project, you also need to consider available resources, potential delays and scope creep, and conflicting priorities happening simultaneously. You also need to assess potential threats and undergo risk mitigation.

Understanding the ins and outs of your projects is the key to success and avoiding estimation errors. One of the best ways to approach this is to implement a project time tracking tool. With Beebole, get real-time insight into hours worked, budget consumed, and detailed project nuance.

Common causes of cost overrun

Cost overruns in project execution don’t necessarily mean failure, but they do speak to your ability to estimate, budget, and plan effectively. Budget overruns can happen for various reasons, and to some degree, you can expect them. That said, you should have a plan in place if they occur. That could look like adjusting the increasing budgets to add more hours, fine-tuning risk analysis prior to a project start, speaking with clients, or finding key takeaways for future budgets. There are several scenarios that seem to be the main culprits for project cost overruns.

• Inaccurate estimations: Inaccurate or overly optimistic initial estimates can lead to budget shortfalls. This might be caused by lack of planning experience or miscalculated rates and budgets from the beginning. It could also be because you haven’t done thorough risk analysis or risk modeling, which can help forecast issues.
• Scope creep: We have a term for this because it’s a fairly common issue in project management. When projects change and new tasks are added to the initial plan, it’s easy for costs and resources to go beyond the original budget.
• Non-nuanced reporting & tracking: Using inadequate tools that don’t accurately capture and measure project time tracking data can lead to blind spots and miscalculations. If you haven’t got a close eye on your projects and their budget status, you run the risk of budget overrun.
• Poor project management: At the end of the day, a seasoned project manager knows how to expertly balance their budgets, employees and contractors, and resources. It’s up to them to implement clear processes, which can be enhanced with the right project management and time tracking tools.

Customer success story: How Rancho BioSciences uses Beebole instead of spreadsheets to avoid project cost overruns

Rancho BioSciences, a Beebole customer since 2016, is a data science curation company offering their services to customers in pharma, foundations, government, and biotech. They boast an international team of experienced PhD and PhD/MD scientists who deliver high-quality, research-based work within biology, diseases, and clinical data. Today they’re sharing their project time tracking journey with us, including how their use of Beebole helps avoid project cost overruns.

As Rancho BioSciences’ senior project management team lead, Brad Farrell is responsible for leading the entire project management team, managing a handful of his own projects, as well as communicating project status and nuance to senior leadership. He and his team use Beebole to help manage the 100’s of simultaneous ongoing projects, as well as the 130+ employees.

As far as Beebole’s data goes, Farrell says it’s a place I can go to see exactly what hours have been worked against the total budget, as well as project status. With so many projects happening at once, Farrell says that Beebole’s bird’s-eye view of all projects, sub-projects, and statuses, as well as its cost and rate functionality, are all factors in his effective project management.

“It sure beats spreadsheets. I love the snapshot views it gives me. I can log in and easily see the status of 130-140 active projects. I can easily see where they’re all at, and if I wanted to dig deep, you know, all the data is there.”
– Brad Farrell, senior project management team lead

Tracking project hours and budgets

For Rancho BioSciences, Beebole is the administrative base for hours worked against set budgets. Farrell cross references the Beebole time tracking data with other software like Excel, Microsoft Projects, or Jira to track deliverables, and from there the time tracking data can also be sent to finance for invoicing. Rancho’s project budgets are all set in hours, and it’s extremely easy to translate a purchase order into an hour amount with Beebole.

“Every purchase order is translated into a Beebole project where we can track hours used against total budget, and that’s also where our accounting department pulls data from to invoice,” according to Farrell. “It does a lot of things really nicely.”

Generating real-time reports and using the API for deeper insight

Farrell noted that Beebole is great for project managers looking for answers to quick questions, like how many billable hours have been logged on this project, or what are the total hours worked for the month of September.

For deeper insight, Farrell uses Beebole’s open API to feed the time tracking data into their own internal program using Python scripts. This internal dashboard uses Beebole data on projects, subprojects, costs, rates, and budgets to create burndown reports. These reports update in real-time to provide insight into the completed and remaining work left within any given project. Farrell says that thanks to Beebole’s wealth of primary data and the open API, their dashboard provides insight into whether projects will finish on time and within budget, if work is being done consistently or sporadically, and it provides insight into which levers they can pull to speed things up if necessary.

Using alerts for project tracking

When a project or subproject gets too close to running over budget in Beebole, it turns yellow. And if it reaches red, you know that you have exceeded the budget. These at-a-glance indicators are key for Rancho Biosciences and the project managers who oversee these projects.

Farrell said he’s really happy with their project planning process, including the analysis done beforehand to budget accurately and include redistributing budget best with a project’s natural flow. Once they start a project, it’s quite easy to see if it’s within budget or not. If a project turns yellow, they know it’s time to have a look at what’s going on and course correct. And if a project turns red, then they know something is very wrong.

These indications set off an alarm for the team to take a deeper look and decide if remedial measures are needed.

“We’re communicating about these things every week, I’m talking to the PMs, but if something is going wrong, they communicate that and we figure it out then, versus waiting until the end of the project where suddenly we have an overrun. We figured it out now. Beebole allows us to do that at a glance,“ Farrell said.

Keeping an eye on the constant stream of projects and their statuses isn’t a small task, but it’s made easier with Beebole’s bird’s-eye view of project status. Farrell says they’ve also started implementing the custom field for project status which helps add a new layer of nuance to their project tracking.

Using time tracking data to cross reference invoices

Apart from Rancho BioScience’s robust internal reports, Beebole’s data also is used for invoicing, in conjunction with other financials-focused systems in place in the company. Because Beebole budget data is tracked in hours and their invoicing data is in dollars, Farrell says that cross-referencing invoices with time tracking data helps keep budgets accurate.

“Being able to run a monthly report—again, I just run one through the API—and roll it all up, and I can easily see: Here’s what accounting has, here’s what Beebole has, and we can reconcile any inconsistencies,” Farrell said.

Using time tracking data to communicate with senior management

One of Farrell’s greatest challenges as senior project management team lead is communicating project nuance to senior management. With over 100 online projects, finding a way to communicate each project’s unique status can be challenging. However, since putting project custom fields in place, he’s been able to add more nuance to the hard data.

“I’ve been challenged the past few years to communicate project nuance to senior leadership. The ability to add that nuance [by adding project custom fields] was really powerful and allows more focused discussion when I’m talking to senior leadership about projects,” Farrell said.

It’s easier to pinpoint what’s in their control to advance projects and what’s not, and it leads to strategic discussions on the exact levers they can pull to speed up projects or find ways to maximize output, for example.

“Beebole allows us an easy way to maximize that value and make sure we’re doing our jobs,” Farrell said.

Looking forward with Rancho BioSciences

Rancho Biosciences is doing great things in the data curation and research world, and they continue to work towards their mission of saving lives through data. 

We’re so happy that they’ve chosen Beebole to help them manage their project time tracking and budgets, and even more grateful that they’ve shared their story with us and anyone else who is looking for a project time tracking tool.

With the help of Beebole, Rancho Biosciences can successfully manage their project budgets, estimates, and potential cost overruns.

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Katie Stearns

Katie is a digital marketer who researches and writes about project management, leadership, and best practices in business operations. She's on a mission to spread the word about the value of accurate and easy project time tracking. Through her interviews, research, and articles, Katie hopes to help professionals on their journey to a happier, more efficient work day.