In architecture and engineering firms, the delays that slow business decisions are rarely dramatic. They’re ordinary. Familiar. Almost accepted.
“We’re waiting on bill reviews.”
“We’re waiting on project status.”
“We’re waiting on finance to pull the numbers.”
None of these sound like existential problems. And yet, taken together, they point to something deeper: a persistent gap between the data A&E firms have and the decisions they need to make.
What firms are really bumping into isn’t a reporting problem—it’s an operating model problem. Traditional business systems were designed to record work after it happened. Modern A&E firms need systems that actively help people think, decide, and act while work is happening.
Most A&E firms are not data-poor. They have business systems full of project, financial, resource, and client information. The challenge is that this information is rarely accessible in the moment it’s needed.
Project managers are busy delivering work. Finance and project accounting teams become de facto information hubs. Executives wait for reports that reflect where the business was, not where it is right now.
As a result, many of the most important decisions in an A&E firm are made with partial or stale information. Not the big annual planning decisions—but the dozens of micro decisions that happen every day inside active projects.
Should we absorb this scope change or push back?
Do we have room to shift resources without creating downstream risk?
Is this client trending toward a cash or margin issue—or is this just noise?
Without a real-time, always-on view of project health—one that triangulates delivery, financials, resources, and client context—teams default to judgment calls. Gut decisions become the operating system.
This is where the idea of amplification matters. When systems can’t surface insights quickly or help teams act on them, people compensate with experience, intuition, and effort. The work gets done—but at the cost of consistency, scalability, and energy.
The moment a system stops helping people move work forward, they find ways around it.
When insight is hard to access, workarounds appear. In A&E firms, that workaround is almost always the spreadsheet.
Spreadsheets show up everywhere: forecasting, staffing, backlog analysis, project tracking, cash planning. They start with good intentions, but quickly turn into shadow systems—parallel versions of the truth that pull teams out of sync.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
A project manager pulls up “Master Staffing Plan v7_final_LC edits.xlsx” to check whether Sarah is available next month for a critical pursuit. At the same time, finance is working from v6, using it to forecast utilization and revenue. By the time the two versions get reconciled, Sarah has already been tentatively assigned to two pursuits—and a delivery team is assuming she’s locked in for a project kickoff.
No one did anything wrong. The system simply couldn’t keep everyone aligned in real time.
Instead of reading from the same sheet of music, different parts of the organization operate on different interpretations of reality.
Behind the scenes, a small group of power users—often in finance or project accounting—hold the organization together. They stitch together data from multiple places, reconcile discrepancies, and respond to a constant stream of ad hoc questions.
It puts enormous pressure on those individuals. And it slows everyone else down.
Five or ten years ago, firms could sometimes afford this friction. Decision cycles were slower. Change was more predictable.
That’s no longer the case.
Today’s A&E firms are operating in an environment defined by pace: faster-moving opportunities, tighter labor markets, more complex delivery models, and greater client expectations. Strategy increasingly depends on understanding backlog, pipeline, resource capacity, and financial performance in near real time.
When insight lags, the consequences compound.
Waiting another week to invoice can turn your firm into the lender for your client.
Waiting another week to surface delivery risk can mean missing a milestone—or losing the chance to course-correct.
Waiting another week on staffing or funding clarity can turn a small delay into a months-long setback.
In a faster world, latency matters.
What firms often don’t realize is how much value is lost in the margins.
Could a project have finished earlier if risk had surfaced sooner?
Could bench time have been deployed more effectively—on delivery or the next pursuit?
Could leaders have made different tradeoffs if they’d seen the full picture sooner?
The human cost is just as real. When teams constantly fight their systems—gathering, reconciling, and validating information instead of acting on it—frustration builds. Burnout follows. Trust in the system erodes.
At its core, this is a problem with how business systems are expected to support decision-making.
The issue isn’t that A&E firms lack data—or tools. It’s that getting the right information, at the right moment, in the right context is harder than it should be. By the time insight reaches the people who need it, the reality on the ground has often already shifted.
In a modern A&E firm, business systems shouldn’t just report on what happened. They should actively participate in running the firm.
That means keeping teams aligned by default, so everyone is operating from the same, current understanding of the business. It means allowing leaders and project teams to interact naturally with their data—asking questions, exploring scenarios, and understanding what matters now without becoming system experts.
It also means moving beyond insight to actually moving work forward—surfacing issues early, enabling action, and taking on analytical work that teams rarely have time to do themselves.
Over time, those systems should get better at this—learning from how the firm operates and creating a reinforcing cycle of clarity, action, and improvement.
One where business systems don’t just record the past, but amplify the people running the firm—working for them, not the other way around.
In the next post, I’ll explore what that future looks like—and what firms should demand as they think about the next evolution of ERP and business intelligence.
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