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| Q1. |
What is unique about Sapience? |
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Sapience is a patent-pending software solution that provides enterprises with accurate information on Exact Effort and Time Productivity. It does this effortlessly - using a high degree of automation |
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These insights enable managers at all levels to get visibility into exactly how the company is spending its cumulative Effort, and exercise their influence to align them more strongly towards corporate objectives. Team leads and individuals can also improve their Time Productivity by optimizing their activity-mix. |
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| Q2. |
Why should we buy Sapience? |
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Sapience delivers significant gains in revenue and increased profitability for the company. Client retention, quality of deliverables, and employee work-life balance, also improve. Here's how. |
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The following recent trends
are making it imperative to measure exact
Effort at companies whose employees rely on computers to deliver their products and services: |
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With more work
being outsourced, clients are demanding
accountability and assurance of time spent on
their projects. On Time & Material
contracts, clients are demanding performance
guarantees on delivery schedules, and
documentation to
validate the person-hours of effort. Manual timesheets may not meet increasingly stringent audit requirements. |
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To cap
costs, projects are increasingly becoming fixed
price. It is estimated that fixed price
contracts are already 30-40% of all contracts,
and this will rise to 60% and more in the next
few years. Fixed price bids require accurate
estimation, which in turn demands proper Effort
measurement of current work. |
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In product companies, time to market can make
the difference between success and failure,
making it critical to be able to accurately
estimate completion timelines. |
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Over 50% of cost is in
employee compensation, yet there is no simple
way to verify that employee Effort capacity is
being fully utilized. Anecdotal evidence is that
over 50% of project teams are significantly
over-worked for long stretches. At the same
time, it is estimated that 20% of employees may be working at 50-60% capacity or less, often because they are not assigned sufficient tasks. |
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Business Results follow
from combined Effort. Effort that is not aligned, inadequate, and wasteful, results in delayed and poor quality Results. This impacts client relationships, and eventually the business. Enterprises invest in tracking Results, but Effort is only a guess (at best). The challenge is exacerbated in today’s work environment of flexi hours, telecommuting, and outsourcing |
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Sapience gives
you extensive analytics on Effort at all levels. First line managers get all-round visibility into their team's progress in terms of exact Effort on actual activities and purposes. They get time productivity, application usage, on-desktop versus offline time distribution etc. Its reports give managers the basis to perform root cause analysis into delays and quality issues by trending activities and actual Effort. |
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CxOs and VPs can get precise insights into effort expended on revenue earning work versus others and detailed breakup by projects, functions, initiatives and locations. |
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At project and company level, Efforts (in person-months) is the sum total of everyone’s Time on various projects, functions, and initiatives. Sapience arms employees with knowledge about their own time utilization. It tells them about exact time spent on projects, corporate and personal work. They get its breakup by meaningful activities such as design time, meetings, calls, and online app usage. |
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In summary, Sapience boosts your organization’s overall revenue and profitability by plugging wasteful Effort and reducing under-utilization of capacity. Managers can reduce stress and burnout by identifying teams and projects where there is sustained over-work. Individuals and teams can optimize their Time Productivity, which in turn leads to higher quality of results, better client retention, and satisfied employees. |
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| Q3. |
How does Sapience work? |
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Sapience determines which applications are being used by each employee on his/her desktop, and for how long. These time slots are mapped to the activities and purpose that an organization wishes to track. Offline time is similarly captured and assigned. |
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Sapience uses learning and rules based intelligence, to increasingly automate these time allocations. |
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The per-employee information is aggregated at team, project, and other company levels and locations. The product’s analytics and trend engine then provides insightful information that helps senior management to enhance overall business efficiency, and individual and teams to improve their own productivity. |
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| Q4. |
Is Sapience yet another Project Management tool? |
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Sapience is not Project Management (PM) software. In fact, it can augment your existing PM process, by supplying reliable data on exact Effort spent on projects and functions, along with details of activity-mix towards meeting the deliverables. |
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With the OpenSapience Application Programming Interface (API), the Effort and Activity-Time information can be sourced programmatically for integration into PM and other third party applications. |
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| Q5. |
We already get Time and Effort data using timesheets or a CRM application. So how is Sapience better than my current approach? |
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Current Effort estimation
methods based on approximate headcount and calendar time, or timesheets and CRM type applications are highly flawed. Bad data can only result in poor decisions. |
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In the headcount approach, consider this example. There are three different project teams which spent 10 person-months each to complete the work. One of them had team members working 50-60 hours average per person each week due to tight deadlines and under-estimation of effort, the second was under-loaded and averaged only 30-35 hours per person-week on the project, while the third spent 40 hours per person-week but 15-20% of that was towards maintenance of an older release. Such underlying differences can account for 10-40% variation between calendar and real Effort. |
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Many now require
employees to fill in timesheets – either on
spreadsheets or CRM applications. Employee inputs tend to be highly inaccurate and very subjective. There is a natural tendency to report only what is expected of them by their manager. Employees also find this a painful chore, especially since over time, the inputs demanded become exceedingly detailed. Users filling in timesheets, especially on weekly basis, cannot be expected to remember exact time-wise breakup on activities and projects. |
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Sapience automates almost the entire process, and requires minimal user input (less than 3 minutes each day). Enterprise Effort and Time Productivity are available at all levels of the organization. Decision-making improves significantly with this high quality data. |
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| Q6. |
Our employees sometimes work on more than one PC. Some machines are remote servers, accessed by multiple users. The Tech Support team works in shifts, with employees using any available PC. Can Sapience handle this? |
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Sapience is able to handle all these cases. Using a unique login identifier per user, it merges data for the same user even if s/he I using multiple PCs, simultaneously or at different times. It distinguishes between different users on the same desktop. Sapience also has the ability to track application usage on common servers through remote desktop technologies such as Microsoft RDC and Citrix. |
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| Q7. |
Is Sapience expensive? |
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Sapience is priced on per-user basis. The per-user permanent license fee is equivalent to a few hours of average per-employee cost to company. Sapience has been demonstrated to save several hours of productivity within the first 30 days of deployment. Therefore, typical Return on Investment (ROI) is typically one month. |
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In fact, productivity improves as soon as people know it is going to be measured. It is therefore very likely that Sapience will pay for itself, right on the first day of deployment! |
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| Q8. |
How do you help address concerns about individual privacy, since Sapience collects information about time spent on applications being used on each desktop? |
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Sapience has been designed to keep in mind the requirements of enterprises, which includes respecting the data privacy of individual employees. It strikes a balance between accountability for work-related time, and privacy for personal time. Sapience provides various guarantees, controls and options to the individual and organization. |
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Employee level |
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Each employee has multiple controls to ensure that only work related summary time information is made available to the organization. Specifically: |
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Employees get detailed information about their Time Utilization on applications, activities, files and web links accessed. This is available for every second of time spent on their computer. This time is marked as being ‘Private’ by default, unless it was explicitly identified as being work related. Though the employee gets very detailed time breakdown, only accumulated total time on applications and activities that are work related are sent to the organization server. |
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Employees have the guarantee that activities and files/web links that are marked as ‘Private’ will not be visible to the organization. |
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Employees are further guaranteed that the exact minute by minute work being done by the employee is not visible to the organization. |
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As a further capability, employees have a Start/Stop option to disable the Time Utilization sourcing on their desktop at any time. This completely eliminates any data from being generated. |
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Employees can view their own trends on the server. Hence, there is complete transparency because this is exactly, and the only, data that will be seen by their managers. |
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Organization level |
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At organization level, the Time Utilization data for each employee is aggregated at a central server. Only total work related time spent on Applications and Activities during the day is available, and not is breakup by hour or minute. There is no data related to ‘Private’ time of any individual, except the total hours of time marked as ‘Private’ for each day. |
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On the central server, the aggregate data is mapped to the organization hierarchy, and made available to employees and managers. Each person can view trends and reports based on his/her position in the company. Everyone gets a view for his/her own data and ‘downwards’ into organization entities that report to the person. It is not possible to see any trends or reports for peers, peer teams, and higher level entities. |
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Organizations are very different, and should have the flexibility to decide their strategy regarding Effort Visibility. Sapience provides various configurable settings that enable a company to decide its model, as described below. |
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| Q9. |
What strategies are possible for Effort Visibility? |
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By setting various flags in the product, an organization can adopt different Effort Visibility strategies. Three typical examples are described below: |
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| Effort Visibility Strategy |
Individual Data Visibility |
Implications |
Team-level Effort
View |
None |
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Managers can analyze and optimize 'Effort' at team level and above, but cannot view individual data |
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Individuals are able to
track their own 'Time Productivity', and feel secure that their data is not visible to others |
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| Project Transparency |
Till Project Manager |
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Project Manager (PM) and team leads can view the individual’s data (excluding data marked as ‘Private’) |
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Senior managers above
the PM can view project and team data, but have no access to individual data |
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Data can
be blocked for select individuals, and disabled for some team leads, even within the project |
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| High Security requirement |
All levels |
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Individual data is available to all managers in the hierarchy |
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Access to all data is available to authorized audit staff for any security related review |
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The first strategy (‘Team-level Effort View’) is appropriate for companies that are averse to any visibility into individual level data, and only want to get trends at team level and higher. Individuals can still track and improve their own 'Time Productivity', while the organization focuses on optimizing 'Effort' at team level and above. |
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The second strategy (‘Project Transparency’) is based on the premise that first line managers should know about work-related activities being done by each team member. This lets them pro-actively determine whether enough effort is being put into specific areas. Such timely advice will prevent teams and projects from drifting off course. Employees have the assurance that any activity marked as ‘Private’ won’t be visible to the manager. They can even turn off the Agent when doing personal work. However, once they mark an activity as work related, then that is rightfully visible to their manager. This policy follows a need-to-know model, and hence managers above the Project Manager do not get to see any individual trends or reports. |
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The last policy (‘High Security requirement’) is required at organizations where information security is a major concern, such as in defense or finance companies. Effort and Time data are made available to all levels of managers. During security audits, authorized staff can also view information for any individual. Employees at such companies are subject to many such security requirements, and accept its necessity given the nature of their work. |
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| Q10. |
How long does it take to deploy Sapience and get it operational? |
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Sapience deployment time typically ranges from half a day at companies with 50-200 employees, to 2-3 days maximum at large organizations (several thousand people). The first phase consists of setting up the server and importing data about projects and team members. Deployment is faster if this information is available on Excel spreadsheet. The next phase is for training managers and team members, and informing them how the desktop Agent can be installed. |
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| Q11. |
How can Sapience be adapted for my organization? |
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Sapience is easily configured to your enterprise. The core functionality is to collect and map Effort and Time Utilization to Activities and Purposes. You can decide the names of Activities that need to be tracked. Besides standard ones like Communication, Meetings, Calls, Documentation etc., you may have specific ones like Requirements, Design, Development, Testing, Support etc. There may be corporate activities that you wish to track like Training, Hiring and Appraisals |
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The Purpose list requires no editing. When a project or function is defined for a team, Sapience automatically assigns it as a possible Purpose to each employee in that team. Some employees may have multiple purposes assigned to them. There are two catch-all purposes – ‘Corporate’ (for Admin, HR and Finance activities like filling up expense reports, applying for leave etc.) and ‘Private’. |
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| Q12. |
I have already invested in project management and governance tools, so how can I avoid yet another platform to track my organization? |
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Sapience can directly boost revenue and profitability, which makes it a powerful application for your enterprise. It does not compete with any existing Project Management (PM) software.It does not compete with Project Management (PM) software, and in fact augments it by providing actual Effort on projects and functions, along with exact time spent on activities and applications. |
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With its Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and OpenSapience API, it enables existing third party applications, or your own web based applications, to access its internal database directly. Hence Sapience data, analytics and reports can be imported into your current applications. |
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Also, to re-iterate, Sapience is not Project Management (PM) software |
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| Q13. |
Effort information can be very useful in my Finance, HR and other applications? Can I integrate Sapience with them? |
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As noted above, the OpenSapience API enables any third party application to be integrated with Sapience. This can be done by your IT team, or by the InnovizeTech professional services team. Integration with your PM, Finance, HR, Engineering, facilities management, and application license management software can result in improved reporting on costs, revenue, quality, people capabilities, facilities and software usage etc. |
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| Q.14 |
We would like to try out Sapience. Do you offer a pilot? |
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Yes – we offer a 60-day trial for up to 25 employees for a nominal fee. Please contact sales@innovizetech.com to get started. |
