CONSULTING PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Manage Consulting Engagements From Delivery to Margin.
Keep consulting engagements, deliverables, team assignments, review, costs, billing and client communication connected, so delivery and commercial performance stay visible in the same place.
Consulting Work Lives in Engagements.
A consulting engagement is a commitment with a value, a scope, a team and a duration. Everything underneath it is work delivering on that commitment, which is why the Engagement rather than the task board is the unit that matters.
- Client The organisation you advise.
- Engagement The commitment: value, currency, team, schedule.
- Deliverable A Task inside it, with a named owner and reviewer.
- Review Senior sign-off before anything reaches the client.
- Cost What delivering it has cost so far.
- Invoice Raised from the schedule you agreed.
Define the Engagement, Then Work Inside It.
An Engagement carries what was agreed: the value, the currency, the payment terms, the team who will deliver it. One client can hold several, running at once or in sequence, each with its own commercial reality.
Deliverables sit inside it as Tasks. Discovery, data analysis, a process review, recommendations, implementation support. Each has an owner, a reviewer, and a record of what happened to it.
Types of Work capture the kinds of deliverable your practice produces repeatedly, so the same information is recorded each time without anyone chasing it.
Assign Specialists, and Reviewers.
Consulting work usually passes a senior pair of eyes before it reaches a client, and that step is where a firm's reputation actually lives.
Every Engagement can name who normally does the work and who normally reviews it, and any deliverable can override both. Review is a recorded decision by a named person, not a comment in a thread, and reassigning a deliverable keeps the history of who held it before.
Pay People the Way You Actually Engage Them.
An associate on a monthly retainer, a subject specialist by the hour, an analyst per deliverable, and a partner taking a fixed amount for the engagement. All four can run on the same engagement without anyone converting them into a common unit first.
Which rate applies to a piece of work is resolved from the most specific to the most general, so a special rate on one deliverable does not require rewriting anything else.
Engagement Economics, While It Is Running.
A consulting engagement that will lose money usually declares itself weeks before anyone notices. The work is being done; it just has not been approved, invoiced or paid yet.
Three cost figures, kept apart: what open work would cost if approved, what has been approved and is owed, and what has been paid. From those, confirmed margin and exposure margin, the second of which counts the work already in flight.
Cash position is reported separately, because a long engagement can be profitable on paper and short of money at the same time.
Scope Changes Are Two Separate Events.
Additional operational work and a commercial renegotiation are different things, and collapsing them is how a firm ends up doing extra work it never charged for, or billing for work the client never agreed to.
Bikabo records the operational fact immediately: work was discovered, here is what it will cost. Adjusting the agreed value is a separate, deliberate act, and the original figure stays on the record beside the new one, so the history of what was agreed and when is intact.
Billing in Stages, and Scheduled Client Work.
The Agreement carries the payment schedule. Invoices are raised from it, payments recorded against them, and what the client still owes is answered from the same records the engagement reports on.
Work that happens at a specific time, such as a workshop or a client interview, is a Task with a schedule, held in the timezone it was agreed in, with any access details it needs kept in an encrypted field rather than a calendar note.
Client Visibility, and Delegation as You Grow.
Clients get a portal showing their engagements as In Progress or Completed, delivered documents and a thread with your firm. They never see who reviewed what, how many revisions it took, or what delivery cost.
Internally, the four Admin profiles let a practice split responsibilities as it grows: someone running delivery without the compensation data, someone owning billing and payouts without assigning work, someone owning client relationships without either.
Who This Fits.
- Operations and implementation consulting with measurable deliverables.
- Digital and technology consulting running several client engagements at once.
- Research and data services, where output is countable.
- Advisory teams that delegate work and review it before it goes out.
And who it does not: a solo consultant with nobody to delegate to. Bikabo is built around work being assigned, reviewed and paid for. Without that, most of it goes unused.
Consulting Questions
It overlaps with some PSA workflows: client engagements, delivery, review, cost exposure, client financials, team compensation and client visibility. It is not currently a full PSA platform, and does not do utilisation optimisation, resource forecasting, bench planning or capacity modelling. If those are what you are buying, Bikabo is not the answer.
Consulting teams rarely pay everyone the same way. A specialist by the hour, an analyst per deliverable, an associate on a monthly retainer. Per unit, per hour, per task, weekly, biweekly, monthly and a fixed amount per engagement are all supported side by side.
Yes, and that is the point. Confirmed margin uses cost that has been approved; exposure margin also counts work that is underway but not yet approved. On a long engagement the second is the one worth watching.
Two separate things, deliberately. Operationally, extra work is recorded as Additional Work with its cost. Commercially, adjusting the agreed value is a decision you record against the Agreement, with the original figure preserved. One does not trigger the other.
Yes. The Agreement carries a payment schedule, whether that is a deposit and a balance, monthly instalments or a custom split, and invoices are raised from it without retyping the figures.
Honestly, not especially. Bikabo is built around delegation: work assigned to someone, reviewed by someone else, costed and paid. A practice of one has no delegation to manage and would carry most of the product without using it.
Where you invite them. They see their engagements as In Progress or Completed, delivered files, their conversation with you and payment information where you enable it. Not who reviewed what, and not what delivery costs you.