The gist

Kahoa, a strategic digital consultancy, implemented Parallax to more proactively and strategically manage its business.

The challenge

Kahoa figured it had its business operations on lock. After all, the digital consultancy was founded in 1996. It had had a lot of time and experience to hone its operations.

But like many digital services companies, Kahoa was reactively managing its resources. The consultancy would win a new project and then have to scramble to find additional resources, hoping it could secure them when Kahoa needed them for the project.

“We started to realize that we needed to be a lot better at resource management and forecasting,” said Chad Atkinson, Partner at Kahoa.

To continue growing in the way it wanted, Kahoa needed to revitalize how it managed its business. The consultancy needed to more proactively and accurately understand its resource needs, improve how it allocated resources to projects, and make forecasting key business metrics a regular habit.

The solution

When Kahoa discovered Parallax, Kahoa’s leadership team was excited that the platform was built by digital services experts for digital services firms. The team behind Parallax understood its customers’ unique needs and challenges because they had once been in their shoes.

Kahoa was confident that Parallax was the right professional services automation (PSA) to support the consultancy’s growth.

Kahoa now uses Parallax as a critical component of its operations to:

• Scope all of its projects with resource plans attached to its sales estimates
• Determine which resources it needs to hire and when based on project details from its sold work and deals projected to close in the sale pipeline
• Calculate how profitable individual projects are projected to be depending on which resources it allocates to a project
• Map out various resource scenarios that include its blended teams in Costa Rica to ensure it can meet client budgets
• Understand when certain projects are projected to start and when others will end
• Forecast customer demand for the consultancy’s technology and service offerings
• Get a snapshot of company performance

What’s next for Kahoa?

Leveraging recent product enhancements, Kahoa plans to use Parallax to allocate its resources not just on their primary skill set but also their secondary skills. As more of Kahoa’s clients seek out full-stack developers, these secondary skill sets are becoming even more important when staffing projects. The ability to allocate resources using a broader set of skills will only accelerate Parallax’s impact on Kahoa’s business.