Claridge & Partners Success Story

Claridge & Partners is a strategy and operations consulting firm headquartered in Chicago with offices in New York, Dallas, and San Francisco. Their 200 consultants — ranging from junior analysts to senior partners — serve Fortune 1000 clients on engagements that typically run 8-16 weeks and bill between $250K and $3M. Like most consulting firms, revenue and margin depend entirely on how effectively the firm tracks and bills consultant time against project budgets.

The firm's project time tracking process had barely evolved in a decade. Consultants were expected to submit weekly timesheets every Friday, allocating their hours across engagement codes, business development, internal initiatives, and professional development. In practice, submission compliance hovered around 58%. Most consultants batch-entered their time for the entire week on Monday morning of the following week, reconstructing their schedules from memory and calendar fragments. The data was too late, too approximate, and too unreliable for meaningful project management.

The consequences were severe. Engagement managers had no real-time visibility into how quickly their project budgets were being consumed. A typical discovery process went like this: a partner would notice that a client engagement felt over-staffed, request an ad-hoc time report, wait 3-5 days for finance to compile it, and discover that the project had already consumed 110% of its budget with three weeks of work remaining. By that point, the only options were to absorb the overrun or have an uncomfortable conversation with a client who had not been warned.

A post-mortem analysis revealed that 6 of Claridge's 14 active engagements in the prior quarter had been unprofitable — a finding that shocked the partnership. The total margin erosion was estimated at $2.1M. The root cause was consistent: scope creep went undetected because no one had time tracking tools that connected consultant effort to project budgets in real-time. Additional hours were staffed, additional analysis was performed, and additional deliverables were produced — all without triggering any budget warning because the data simply did not exist until weeks after the work was done.