A new A.I.-driven software tool now gives architects and designers a collaborative way to manage teams, projects, and business.

It’s called Mosaic, and it’s specifically designed for architecture, engineering, and design firms. “Mosaic allows you to manage who’s working on what and when” says John Meyer, founder and CEO of Mosaic. “Leadership can quickly and easily see what the whole company is working on.”

Meyer holds multiple degrees in engineering. He spent over 20 years working on architectural design and structural engineering. In 2005, while in grad school, he started his own architecture and engineering firm in Manhattan. A few years later, he launched a software agency that specialized in building productivity software. These experiences inspired him to build Mosaic, a tool to manage people, projects, and the business.

“At the architecture and engineering firm I built, I was the managing partner and in charge of resource management,” he said. “I would schedule workload with spreadsheets, and I didn’t find it particularly enjoyable.” He set out to reimagine the process as a modern web application. In speaking to other architects and designers, he discovered that they were all wrestling with the same challenge: How to manage their firms while working on client projects. None of them had gone to school to study management; they were there to design.

“There’s a universal need for this tool for project and resource management,” he said. “It shines over other project and people planning software, because it helps you get the right person on the right project at the right time.”

If a project is slated to start up in two months and requires a studio head, a project manager, a senior architect, and a junior architect, Mosaic can indicate who can be scheduled
based on availability, roles and skills. “And it effectively manages any requirements you may have, like location and time zone,” he says. “It manages and helps triage; It’ll show you if you can do it in the time scheduled.”

The most profitable firms, he notes, are not always the largest. They’re the ones with the highest efficiency rates. “Efficiency gives you more time to bill,” he said. “A good portion of people’s time is not billable, because of inefficient planning. Mosaic helps you plan efficiently. It also integrates with your current financial software, which eliminates double data entry, another efficiency boost.”

Because of these efficiency improvements, Mosaic helps put an end to overtime hours. “If you plan poorly, you end up working nights and weekends to get a project over the finish line,” he said. “With Mosaic, you can control that because you’re out in front of the project deadline.”

The software also uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide reporting, predictions, and recommendations about a firm’s workload and workforce. “You’re able to learn more about your firm within a few months than you have ever known, like which projects are the most profitable, which are the least, which ones are trending to go over budget, and which ones are at risk of going past deadline,” he said. “You can see where one project came in 20 percent higher than the fee, then factor that in and not make the same mistakes again.”

Ultimately, Mosaic is on a mission to enable the highest levels of collaboration and create a connected workforce by providing visibility into what’s actually happening inside a company and layering that with AI-powered predictions and recommendations. “It’s an incredibly powerful tool that gets everybody on the same page, which eliminates a huge, common headache for teams,” he said.

Mosaic guarantees to increase firm productivity and profitability by optimizing firms’ billable time to improve utilization rates. The company provides a free 30-day trial and offers per-user pricing.

The proof of Mosaic’s effectiveness lies in the number of clients it serves. “We’ve been growing at 30 percent month over month for the past 15 months,” he says. “We have firms with teams of five and teams of 5,000 across the US and Canada using Mosaic. It’s a valuable tool that scales with organizations.”

And that’s because it offers a way to visualize and manage change—as it happens.

This post was created in partnership with Mosaic.

For more, go here.

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