Consultancy Project Performance Metrics
Published: 10/03/2025
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This article focuses on consultancy project performance metrics and how to track the right ones. It will also explore how recording the right KPIs will help your business in the long run.
For the project to reach a favourable conclusion, which is a smooth and timely delivery, many things must happen. Each project has multiple moving parts, and keeping tabs on their individual performances is key to fitting within both budget and time constraints. But here comes the issue - it is practically impossible to always be on top of things. This is especially true for consultancies, which usually juggle several projects at any given time. Fret not - there is a solution.
Further in this article, we will discuss KPIs and how to set the correct ones for your consultancy. We will also discuss how they can help you tailor and optimise your team’s efficiency moving forward. In the second half, we will focus on client satisfaction and how keeping track of performance metrics helps you keep the clients happy.
Since we’ve already established that every project has a set of metrics you need to track to ensure its success, let’s look at the ones that are universal to all of them. The project performance metrics you should pay attention to in every project are gross margin, productivity, cost, scope of work, and satisfaction.
The rest of the metrics pretty much fall under the umbrella of these five. However, the segments you will utilise largely depend on your business. Further in this article, we will discuss choosing the right ones for your consultancy.
Since there is no one-for-all answer regarding what KPIs you should track, we will instead share tips on determining the correct set for yourself. Remember, as time passes, the focus metrics will likely change, so don’t be alarmed when that happens.
While not every consultancy project pursues different objectives, different organisations certainly prioritise different goals. Depending on your industry, once you develop a set of KPIs for one project, you will apply them to the rest of them. Here’s where it gets tricky. While there are industry-best and recommended KPIs, they are suggestions and a pointer in the right direction. Every business is vastly different, ranging from its value proposition to its team structure. The performance metrics you track will be unique as they should be tailored based on the company’s internal processes, capacity, digital gear and other factors. Additionally, they are directly related to your goals, company mission and the things you prioritise in both servicing your clients and business development.
You must analyse your resources, historical data and goals to set the right KPIs. Finding the connection point between them creates the perfect ground for identifying the key performance indicators. While the benchmark for them will most likely differ with every project, having a consistent list of metrics to track can help with improving project forecasting and ease the scoping process.
KPIs are crucial for measuring team and project efficiency. While they’re a tool to track the project's progress and optimise it as you go, they allow you to gauge why your team might not be hitting the benchmarks. The correct set of tracked KPIs provides data that can be utilised to fill in the gaps within your organisation that are affecting your team’s efficiency, such as incorrect task distribution or prioritisation.
While KPIs are essential to hold yourself accountable when reporting the progress to the client, they have long-term benefits for your organisation as a whole. Based on KPIs and your ability to hit them and visibility on how long that takes, you can tailor, optimise and touch up your approach moving forward. Think of KPIs as a way to categorise the data you collect, making it more digestible and more manageable to act on.
One of the key consultancy project performance metrics is client satisfaction. With it being low, a project cannot be considered successfully delivered even if, in theory, it’s complete. This metric is difficult to track and gauge, requiring a little more creativity and thinking outside the box.
Delivering what you've promised is the best way to keep your client happy. While many will welcome early deliveries and budget leftovers, the opposite can harm your company’s reputation. Project forecasts are seldom 100% accurate regarding budgets and deadlines, but they are considered a solid pointer, which clients then use to manage expectations. Naturally, when you go overboard, the expectations are unmet, potentially affecting other areas of your client’s business.
Staying vigilant of consultancy project performance metrics allows you to change the course of the project if needed. Keeping tabs on both the flow and the budget enables quick rerouting when you suspect things aren’t going according to plan. And while altogether avoiding any deviations from the original forecast is often impossible, it’s in your power to minimise its impact and significance to your project.
The best way to learn if the client is happy is to ask directly. A post-project survey serves this exact purpose. Often, people find it easier to answer questions with pre-set answers or are more willing to give feedback indirectly. Not to mention, a survey means they can fill it out at their convenience. For this reason, you should develop a questionnaire-like template you can send to the client after completing their project. With the proper setup, you can even automate it to go out automatically once the final task is ticked completely.
Beyond gauging satisfaction, this approach can also tell you much about your team’s general performance. For example, if there’s a pattern of clients being unhappy with communication, that’s the area you need to work on. Find out where the gaps are by digging in deeper to narrow down the origins of the issue. Is it the lack of updates, long wait time or something else? Once you recognise the problem, you can begin challenging it.
As stated at the beginning of the article, the correct performance metrics go much further than the projects they track. Primarily, when accumulated, they will feed back into your business. Patterns that highlight your shortcomings and future opportunities emerge in the data you collect if you track the right metrics.
You might have noticed through reading this article that, ultimately, everything is linked. While performance metrics are typically used to ensure the projects go as intended and provide updates to the client, consultancies benefit significantly from them. Namely, the recorded data goes beyond just one project; it’s a building block in the organisation’s strategy moving forward as it opens the door to improved efficiency.
With your strategy shiting, the KPIs that matter will change too. This is due to your consultancy taking a different approach, switching around priorities, or pursuing other goals - either way, this is natural. With new performance metrics to track or putting the old ones into new contexts, you will gradually transform your business by tackling and optimising different areas each time. This will naturally lead to improved services, which is essential to making yourself the name and, in turn, attracting new clients, new projects and new challenges. All in all, when done correctly, this creates a full circle that can be repeated repeatedly. The only one to decide where the line to improvement is is you.
Since every project consists of multiple moving parts, keeping track of them all simultaneously is challenging. However, using your business goals and task priorities, you should be able to set the KPIs that focus specifically on the metrics contributing to successful project delivery. Tracking them will help you stay transparent with your clients and highlight potential gaps in your strategy, enabling you to optimise your overall strategy. All in all, the right KPIs can deliver many long-term gains.
However, it can be tricky to determine if your project performance metrics are right for you. There are two ways to assess it quickly. Firstly, investigate whether the KPIs you track help you ensure you fit within your budget and timeframes. Secondly, ask your clients post-delivery about their experience and satisfaction with the process. For the best results, combine both practices and optimise accordingly. When done correctly, data collection and utilisation will form a full circle, allowing you to better your business practices as you go.
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