Success Story: UHY PROSTOR

october 12, 2021

How accounting outsourcing implements a project management model

• UHY Prostor helps businesses grow and develop by finding their free resources and untapped assets. In other words, they provide outsourced accounting services. The company is a representative of the UHY International network in Ukraine, and given the current market activity, the growth of UHY Prostor is inevitable. It’s just a matter of time and proper organization of processes.

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• According to the owner of the company, Oleksandr Koinov, before the start of scaling, it was necessary to fix 2 aspects.

  The first step was to get an accurate understanding of which project is profitable and which is not. After all, earlier the decision on which client to continue cooperation with was made based on feedback from managers and accountants. Now the management of UHY Prostor wanted to know the cost of the project expressed in numbers.

  The company also wanted to clearly understand the workload of specialists. Just the fact of the staff overload was not enough. UHY Prostor wanted to understand the reasons behind this.

  So, the company started searching. The main issue was not even the toolkit (using Microsoft Project, Bitrix24 or good old Excel), but the methodology that helps to cope with the chaos. Therefore, before the start of global changes, the leaders and managers of UHY Prostor decided to get knowledge.

  

  The services of SMART business include a separate educational direction: training programs, webinars, certified trainings to expand the expertise and systematize knowledge in a particular area or technologies. One of such courses on project management was taken by UHY Prostor.

  Vlad Berezin, trainer of the course, as well as PM and analyst of the Microsoft Project implementation project at UHY Prostor on the part of SMART business, comments on the need to use a conscious approach to project management:

  “In today’s market conditions, managing business processes, as well as various applications within these processes, is a necessity, not a luxury. It is possible to follow the chosen strategy and effectively cope with problems only when the processes are described, standardized, adapted and automated. This also applies to project management processes.”
   
  

  Oleksandr also gives an answer to a question why UHY Prostor has chosen the way of project business:

  “As an owner, I saw this as the only way to structure projects and rely on this structure in the future. It is possible to scale only through understanding of “what we do, how we do it and with what resources.”
   
  

  As of October 2021, the UHY Prostor team received a tool – Microsoft Project, knowledge about project management, project management processes, as well as instructions that need to be implemented.

  But software and outlined business processes are just the tip of the iceberg. The “underwater” part of the work is to convey to the employees the need for changes and enter all projects into the system in accordance with the methodology and instructions from SMART business. At the moment, the company has begun to streamline 33 accounting outsourcing projects. Over time, this will be extrapolated to auditors, lawyers, HRs and other employees of the company.

  All of the business processes mentioned above are divided into 5 categories:

  1. Project initiation processes
  2. Corporate planning processes
  3. Processes for planning a single project
  4. Processes for implementation, control and closure
  5. Change management processes

  But in fact, there is also a “zero category”. Oleksandr calls this work a “project implementation project” and says that at the moment, it takes 30% of the working time. The team has no resistance to change, as they understand that in the future they will have an effect in the form of time savings and a better understanding of the processes. And, as a result, more earnings in their business unit.

  What changes after Microsoft Project implementation?

  The changes affect the business owner, business unit leaders, and project managers in different ways.

  The project manager will be able to:

  • See the calendar of each member of their team, in which tasks will be scheduled 1 year in advance. Of course, not every business can afford such foresight, but when it comes to accounting outsourcing, the projects are predictable and cyclical.
  • Each manager will be able to determine the cost of the project in advance and set the price for the client, depending on the expected marginality. Since UHY Prostor has a fairly democratic corporate culture, a PM may even decline a project if they realize that it does not meet their financial goals.
  • The project manager will be able to reduce their personal stress level and the stress level in the team by clearly planning and tracking workload. They will also understand in advance whether it is necessary to attract additional staff to carry out project work and how much this staff will cost.

   

  The owner and CEO will be able to:

  • Scale the business through a deeper understanding of projects and previously known information about the lack of resources, and most importantly, in what period the company will face a resource shortage,
  • Track key project indicators and project portfolios in real time and respond in time to possible problems without the need to check this information with PM personally. The system will tell you everything in numbers.

   

  “SMART business has implemented Microsoft Project Online and Microsoft Project Professional solutions in UHY Prostor, that is tools that will allow the company to reach a completely different quality level of project management. This is not about excessive control. This is about how strategic and tactical planning helps to get rid of chaos and make daily work measured and predictable.”
  

  “As of September 2021, we have fully launched 4 projects in Microsoft Project, by January 2022 we plan to launch all 33 projects, and each new project will be registered in Microsoft Project. What can we say about the result of implementing 4 projects? There is more clarity about the time it takes to complete tasks, the workload of the team in the context of its members. It is still not entirely clear to me how I can set up dashboards in order to receive the necessary information on new projects and aggregate information on all projects of the company, but we’ll test it during studying. I would like to add that the process of implementing Microsoft Project in our company is exactly the case when the development and implementation of the program helped our entire team to master the project management tools.

  I would also like to note the role of Vlad Berezin in the implementation of Microsoft Project in our company. For me, it is important to promote strategically important processes that should be implemented in our business through their acceptance and support of the entire team. In the summer of 2020, our team of managers and executives participated in the Project Manager training program taught by Vlad. As a result of this training, there was a general consensus that the project management methodology works great with our accounting outsourcing projects. Subsequently, Vlad was the project manager for the implementation of Microsoft Project in our company. We can safely say that our communication with Vlad became one of the reasons for our new business transformation, for which I am very grateful to him.”

   

  To learn more about the solutions and services of SMART business,
  call +38 (044) 585-35-50 or submit your request here.

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