Life is a Bell Curve

Ok, so you know that you are like Indiana Jones and time sheets are your snakes. But are time sheets big, scary boa constrictors for all of us, or do some of us think that time sheets are more like gardner snakes?

I have managed hundreds of consultants in my career, and I can say that we all don't feel the same amount of distain for the treaded time sheet. I haven't talked with anyone who likes time sheets, but some of us hate them less than others. Like most things in life, the level of hate falls along a continuum.

I fall along the far right...I am naturally detail oriented, long to be the A+ student, and pride myself on being thorough. While I don't enjoy time sheets, I see them as a necessary evil, and I have developed systems to help me keep accurate records of where I am spending my time throughout the week. My time sheets are submitted accurately and on time!

I have worked with a few consultants who are the exact opposite of me. They don't get it, they don't care, and they just don't do it. One of my consultants a few years ago had 6 weeks of time sheets outstanding (we didn't bill hourly). When I finally gave him the ultimatum, he had all 6 weeks submitted in 20 minutes...there is no way his time sheets were right. He made it all up.

Then there is everyone else. They get it, and they care, but so many other things take priority. They don't keep up. These folks spend on average, my market research indicates, 3-5 hours per week trying to keep track of their hours, doing the archeological dig through calendars, email, and files to recreate their week. They can't find it all and end up dumping a bunch of hours they know they worked but can't find into non-billable and billable projects without really knowing that the time is right. Its a burden, they hate it, and the data they submit, while better than the guys on the far left, is not accurate.

Where do you fit along this continuum? I'd love to hear from you. 

amulligan@sophity.com

@SophityPSA
Sophity on Faebook

The Snake in the Room...

Superman has kryptonite, Indiana Jones has snakes, and Consultants have...the dreaded time sheet.

When we left Indiana, he had just jumped into the plane, and Jacques was pulling away from the river's edge. He looks down and sees snakes slithering around the floor of the plane and up his legs. "I HATE SNAKES!" said Indie.

As I said, we consultants have snakes too. As we move through our day and week, we are bombarded with major disruptions from members sales, marketing, product management, other customers, etc. We push "send" on that email with the deliverable that was due today attached. Its 6p, and we are running late for something (dinner, kids soccer game, a flight out), so we hightail it out of the office and to our car, but its not until we are half way home that we remember that time sheets are due and we completely forgot to submit ours. "I HATE TIME SHEETS!" we say to ourselves!

Time sheet data submitted by the consultants is critical to the business owners ability to properly bill customers, evaluate service offerings, and manage resource needs and allocations. Yet, time tracking and submission is often an after thought for most consultants. In the grand scheme of things, tracking time and inputting it into the system is the last thing the consultants want to do.

You commit to getting your time sheet done once you get home, but dinner's ready and the kids need help with their home work. You completely forget. You get to work on Monday morning, and there are a handful of emails in your inbox - some reminding you to get your time sheet in on time; others nagging you because your time sheet is late.

When you open up the time sheet system to complete your time sheet - you are stuck. You don't remember what you did yesterday, let alone last week. You start what I call the archeological dig:

• First you dig through your calendar
• Next, you look at emails and phone records
• Then you search through the various documents on which you worked throughout the week.

You piece together some of the time, but you have to make up the rest. Do you add the missing time to non-billable tasks like "Admin," or do you add time to your billable projects?

We'd love to hear from you? How much time do you spend each week recreating your week for your time sheet? What do you do with all those hours you know you worked but for which you cannot find?

Contact us at amulligan@sophity.com.

How Much Are You Losing Because of Inaccurate Time Sheets?

A recent survey we conducted of IT Consultants indicates that 73% of consultants knowingly submit time sheets that do not accurately reflect the work they did.

Incorrect time sheets affect revenue in 2 ways:

• Directly for time-and-materials projects by misrepresenting hours work and, therefore, billed to clients
• Indirectly for fixed-fee projects when the data for those projects are used as the basis of estimates for future projects

Do you know how much revenue you are leaving on the table?

Sample:

Number of Billable Consultants on the team: 11
Bill Rate: $200.00
Billable Hours Missed per Time Sheet: 1
Time Sheets Submitted/Year: 48
Revenue Lost for Work Actually Performed: $105,600 (3% of available capacity)

Plug your data into this equation and do the math for yourself:

# of Consultants * Billable Rate/hour * # of hours missed each week * # of billable weeks/consultant

We want to hear from you!

• Not a problem for you? What have you done to ensure accurate time sheets each week from your consultants?
• If you are still struggling with this? What have you tried? Why have those things not worked?

Contact us at amulligan@sophity.com.

IT Consultants and Indiana Jones Have A Lot In Common

Remember the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Indiana Jones is in the cave, he has found the Idol  for which he has, presumably, been searching for some time. He replaces the Idol with a bag of sand, thinks he is out of the woods, then the drama begins. The stone platform begins to slip down, the walls start caving in, and Indiana, with the Idol in hand and his guide, run as fast as he can past shooting darts, falling stones, and floors that are opening up to get out of the building.

The guide makes if over a large crevasse first. Indiana agrees to throw him the Idol in return for the whip he needs to get across the gaping hole. Only the guide doesn't fulfill his end of the bargain. Indiana is in the cave without the Idol or an obvious way out. This is Indiana Jones, though. He leaps, jumps, runs, and makes his way out of the cave safely, retrieving the Idol from the guide before he makes it out. When he gets out, though, Belloq - his arch nemesis - and a band of native warriors are waiting for him. They take the Idol and threaten to kill Indiana.

Indiana is able to break free, running toward Jacques - his pilot - and the plane. He makes it to the plane, with 10s, if not 100s, of warriors chasing and shooting at him.

So what does this have to do with Consulting? Well, if you have ever been a consultant, you know what I mean.

Consultants are tasks with on-time / on-budget delivery of value added serves for their clients. They are often assigned to 3-5 projects, or more, at one time. Their clients have expectations about what will be delivered to them by when. So, consultants carve out time to work on tasks and deliverables to ensure project objectives are met and clients are happy.

However, like Indiana Jones, consultants rarely get to truly focus on the task at hand. Like most busy professionals, they are over worked and inundated with significant disruptions throughout the day. Each warrior chasing Indiana Jones out of the woods represents a Sales Rep that unexpectedly needs the consultants help to close a deal today, or a Client that needs something earlier or different than planned, or a manager or team member looking for time and help on another project.

Indiana makes it to the plane with Jacques, but as the plane pulls away from the river bank, Indiana is compelled to look down only to find big, ugly snakes at his feet and starting to crawl up his legs. In case you don't remember...Indiana Jones "HATES SNAKES." Consultants have a snake or 2 that we hate, too. We'll talk about them next week.

If you are an IT or Management Consultant and this story resonates with you, I'd love to chat with you, share battle scars, and learn how you reduce the disruption in your day-to-day so you can focus on getting the most important work done on-time and on-budget. Reach out to me at amulligan@sophity.com.

Oh, and if you haven't seen Raiders of the Lost Ark - you should...its awesome! #RaidersoftheLostArk #IndianaJones @SophityPSA

Utilization - Is it a Valuable Metric to Measure?

I was talking to a member of the consulting community recently about how best to evaluate a consultant practice. This person provides consulting to consultants, and he indicated that he often tells his customers to stop measuring utilization. It did not become clear in our conversation what he thinks is wrong about the utilization metrics, but I've been giving it a lot of thought since then. So, I wanted to investigate the pros and cons of measuring utilization.

On the cons side, utilization does not reflect the value that has been delivered. It rewards the amount of work done and not the results of the work.  This reward system is in conflict with my post "Customers aren't paying you to work hard, they are paying you to add value and drive results" from December 2013.

I am a firm believer that one's compensation plan drives his behavior. Paying consultants a bonus based on utilization drives them to find ways to do as much billable work as possible. While this may drive revenue and ensure that consultants raise their hands for more work when they are rolling off a project, some of the work done to achieve a utilization target may or may not drive value and result in a positive change for the customer. It may also encourage individuals to pad their time sheet by rounding up or adding a few minutes here or an hour there, just to make sure that "this week's utilization target" is met and one stays off the manager's warning list.

On the pros side, the reality is that consultants and consulting teams have a finite amount of time to dedicate to billable work. In addition to delivering billable work, consultants need to conduct business development activities, skills development, thought leadership, and a list of administrative tasks that all must get done for the business to work. Setting utilization and hourly rate targets allow you to assess your capacity to drive revenue:

• Billable FTEs: 10
• Working Hours per Billable FTE per Year: 2080
• Target Utilization: 75%
• Target Bill Rate: $250

=((10 * 2080) * 75%) * $250 = $3,900,000

So if you managed a team of 10 billable consultants, each expected to deliver 75% utilization at $250/hour, you could manage a $3,900,000 practice. That equals 15,600 hours of consulting in a year at that hourly rate. If your management set a goal for $5,000,000, what can you do increase revenue.

There are really two ways I can think of to increase your revenue:

• Add more consultants (either as full-time employees or as contractors)
• Increase your rates. 

If you don't have the opportunity to increase rates, you must add people to deliver the additional 4,400 hours of consulting that you will be expected to deliver.

As you track utilization you can learn when you are over burdening your team and likely to have to delay start times on projects because of the lack of availability of your team. Most consulting practices maintain some form of acceptable backlog. (I have found that 4-6 weeks is a reasonable time for me as a manager to have visibility into what my team will be doing and revenue we will generate and still be reasonable for most clients to wait before we start their project. Longer than 6 weeks, though, I risk loosing the contract or frustrating an important customer too much.) As I monitor utilization and my forecast for the coming months, I can advocate for short-term or permanent increased (or decreases) to the size of my team to take on additional work and meet market demands.

I also use utilization to evaluate where we are spending our time. I measure utilization at the practice level, individual level, and resource-type level. This gives me another view into the state of my practice and potential changes that may be needed: Are we able to drive revenue and customer value with less experienced and expensive consultants, or do we need to depend more heavily on our more senior and expensive resources?

At the individual level, I look for individuals who consistently miss their utilization target. I don't worry about weekly anomalies, but if I see a consultant who is not meeting the target regularly, I work to determine why:

• Is the consultant lacking the skills required to do the work we are selling? Can we provide training to this person?
• Is there a behavior or cultural issue that makes it difficult to put this consultant on projects? (I have worked in organizations where the project managers or technical leads can proactively request specific resource to work on projects and even to NOT work on projects.)

Once I know why the individual's utilization is low, I can address it proactively.

I had a chance to attend a lunch and learn session with David A Fields last month.  David talked a lot about pricing based on value rather than time. He encouraged the consultants in the room to dig in with their clients to understand their pain and determine the measurable value of addressing the pain, then determine the value of the work you, as a consultant, will do to move the needle in the right direction. Once you understand that value equation, David says, you can price based on that, often times earning significantly hire rates than what you consider "list" price or "target bill rate."

While I agree completely with David's philosophy, the reality still remains that a consultant only has so much time and needs to understand when he (or his team) is taking on too much and won't be able to deliver what is promised. It is also important to measure the time spent on the project after it is completed to ensure that the amount of work required to deliver the value was in line with the practice economics. If, for instance, you determined that the value of the work that you will do is $20,000 but it takes you 200 hours to deliver that value, would you earn enough money to sustain your business? 200 hours delivered against a $20,000 invoice is $100/hour. Is that acceptable for your business? Should you take work like that on? Only you can decide.

Ignoring utilization completely is dangerous and will leave you exposed. However, relying on it too heavily can drive the wrong behavior from your team. Develop compensation plans with a combination of metrics and goals that drive the right behavior - with a focus on value creation, and use utilization as one data point to indicate the health of your practice.

I'd love to hear from you on how you use utilization in your practice.

Stop Hiding Behind PowerPoint

PowerPoint vs. No PowerPoint, that is the question...

I have a number of "Andrea-isms" that I share with my team, colleagues, and on this blog from time to time. One is "Blank Whiteboards Beget Blank Stares." I encourage the folks around me to come prepared to challenging discussions with a "straw man" idea for what is needed, giving the folks engaged in the discussion something to which they can react, critique, and evolve. It works...just this week I shared with a colleague the current wireframes for a new technology I am building. He was able to confirm many of the things I am planning for this technology, but in the process also expanded my thinking with ideas he had that would make the solution more valuable to him. Would I have been able to get such a reaction if I didn't show him anything and illustrate what I was planning. Maybe, but given that I have a hypothesis and proposed solution, of course I will show it to him and ask him to poke holes in it.

I didn't, however, come up with a 25-slide deck to run through with him, asking him to review and read each slide while I spoke to him about what each meant, and then asking him to think creatively as part of a dialog to evolve my thinking. If I had, he would have been sucked into the slides, trying to read each word and understand what I was trying to get across while also trying to the words I was throwing at him. I would have been more focused on presenting and "getting through all my slides" than I would have been in having an open discussion with him about how to make my solution better and more valuable to him.

Unfortunately, I think many of us rely too much on tools like PowerPoint when we feel we have important points we want to get across, limited time to do so, and a large and/or challenging audience that we may or may not know. The end result is a presentation during which you impart all of your wisdom and learn little or nothing from the audience or meeting participants.

I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with David A. Fields, a consultant to the consulting community and an expert in connecting the right consultant to his business customers, enabling a higher ROI on services rendered. David hosted a session with the Crimson Consulting Collaborative, of which I am part, and discussed ways consultants fail to properly sell their value and drive revenue. It was great. David reminded many of us of key best practices that are easily forgotten or not trusted when in the field, and he did so without a single PowerPoint.

As a participant, David's session felt very much like an ad hoc discussion with like-minded people, he as the facilitator. The reality is, though, that David had a well-planned and practiced presentation in which he planned to take us through a journey of "ah ha" moments. He's done this session before, and he will do it again - almost the same way each time. The questions may vary from session to session, but they all tie back to the journey he wants to take us on, and he knows how to respond to each and make sure we get the lessons learned he set out to impart on us. Each one of us left the one-and-a-half hour sessions with a key lesson learned and a desire to purchase his book, talk to our colleagues, or hire David for more one-on-one assistance...not a single PowerPoint.

I realized in this session that PowerPoint is a great tool, but I often hide behind it. While I know I can use PowerPoint to build my story boards for the discussion I want or have been asked to facilitated, but I don't have to show them. Although, I almost always to. (David had notes or slides on his iPad, which never far from site.) By choosing to keep the slides to himself, David quickly connected with his audience and invite Q&A a long the way. If you have a deck, you expect and are expected to present the deck. This puts you in the role of "speaker." As a consultant or a consultant who sells, though, the more you are talking, the less you are listening and learning, and less likely you are to assist this customer in asking and answering their own questions (from Peter Block).

David could have shared his slides with us, talked through them, and before moving on to the next slide, asked "are there any questions." Having taken that approach time and time again in my career, I suspect it would have been a much less dynamic conversation and the "ah ha" moments may not have happened so quickly.

Be prepared for the meetings you facilitate, for sure, but try stepping out of your comfort zone, closing your laptop, and have a conversation. If you need to jump up to white board a concept or an example...go for it. (I keep a set of dry erase markers in my work bag for just those occasions.) If you know there are certain topics that warrant a visual, practice your "impromptu" white board often so you can get it right and appear as though you are thinking on your feet (which you are, since you will only jump to the white board when the conversation lends itself to you doing so).

10 Things You Can Do to Be More Effective In Getting What You Need Internally

Two weeks ago, I wrote about ways in which I have worked with sales to build stronger relationships and effectively protect my business, team, and clients. In so doing, we had fewer projects that we couldn't support and a stronger ability to plan resource needs. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than the Wild West scenario that I described toward the end of the post.

As promised (although a week late), I want to share 10 things I have done in the past to ensure I had or was able to get the resources I needed when I needed them. With that said, there is no silver bullet. Your ability to get what you needs is dependent on a lot of outside factors. Things like:

• Economic Environment: The Services business may be killing it, but sales overall may be down; Management may impose a hiring freeze across the board, and you have to get it done with less.
• Product Development Cycles: You may have a need for a member of the Engineering team, but they have a critical release and can't step away. You have to figure it out on your own or delay your client.
• Corporate Philosophy: Let's face it, not all departments are created equal, and if you work in an organization that pays lip service to the value Services provides, you will have a difficult time getting what you need, no matter what you do. (I've been there!)
• Perceived Role of Services: If Services is perceived first and foremost as a profit center, almost every decision will be made based on the impact it has on margin, regardless of the impact elsewhere. That is not to say you can't get what you need, but you need to understand this fact and position your business case in this context.

So, here are 10 things I have done in the past to get the resources I need when I need then.

1. Working with Sales to Manage What Is Sold and Understand Your Pipeline: I discussed this first action in depth in my last post. In the end, you need to be perceived as part of the sales team, helping to close deals, but you also need to clearly articulate your constraints and the impact of bad projects on the clients and the business. Its a relationship play - start now.
2. Effective Project Estimation to Understand Your Pipeline and Backlog Better: How many of us really feel confident in the estimates we put forth? Do we really have the information we need from the client? Do we understand all the risks, and have we mitigated them effectively through contingency? Have we taken the time to assess past projects "like this one" to ensure that we have historical information that supports this estimate? If you miss the estimate by any significant margin, your capacity planning will be wrong and you may not have the resources you need when you need them. In one role, my team and I developed a five-day "jumpstart" engagement. We sold it for $12,500 as a standard offering. We assumed five days of effort for pre-engagement planning, execution, and post-engagement wrap up. We sold more than I can ever guess in this model. We eventually went back and evaluated the time sheets of these engagements and found that no engagement was actually completed in five days. For every day of client-facing work, there was at least 1/2 day of non-client-facing work we needed to do. Our five-day engagement was really eight days. We adjusted our time estimate and our pricing. In so doing, we increased revenue, improved our margin, and had more effective capacity planning. We had the resources we needed when we needed them.
3. Using Earned Value Analysis (EVA) to Assess Project Trajectory:  I feel like I am aging myself with the EVA reference...does anyone use EVA any more? Well even it if it is not used formally in this agile development world, I think the concept still holds true. At the most basic level, EVA is an assessment of the likelihood a project will complete on time on budget based on what has been completed to date. Are you 50% complete with the work but have consumed 60% of the budget? If yes, your EVA would indicate a cost/time over run. Likewise, if you are 50% complete with the work but have consumed 40% of the budget, the EVA would indicate on-time, on-budget (or ahead of schedule) delivery. Now, we all know that past performance is not a promise of future performance, but it is an indicator you can use to determine if resources are likely rolling off projects when initially planned. You can then start to think about whether you have a scheduling conflict with another project for which you need the same resources or if you will be able to start a future project sooner or crash a schedule by adding additional resources since they may be available.
4. Setting Project Managers' Expectations on the Importance of Project Plan Updates for Effective Backlog Burn Rates:  I have seen too many times a PM running to a resource manager in a panic because he didn't communicate that he needed "this" resources for two more weeks, and the resource just casually mentioned that she will be in Tuscan next week starting her next gig. Like it or not, the PMs hold the keys to ensure that the right information is communicated early and often so that adjustments can be made earlier to avoid strain in the system. As project managers (PM) are assessing a project's status, using EVA and other tools, they should be expected to make updates to project and resource plans in what every system you use (PSA, Spreadsheets, Staff Meetings, etc.) to effectively communicate to management capacity needs on a project. Without the input from the PMs, resource managers will be in the dark about what resources are needed when. Setting PMs expectations on what happens when they do or don't communicate schedule changes is key to making it happen. 
5. Use Monthly Capacity Planning Reports and Meetings with Finance: Similarly to the post on working with Sales, Finance holds a big key as to whether you get what you need or not. The more they understand your business and trust your models, the more confidence they will have in the business cases you put forth and, barring any external factors, the more likely they will be to go to bat for you if you need something out of plan. I have found that providing regular reports to finance on revenue, margin, and capacity (existing vs. planned) ensures that the right level of regular communication is happening and provides a forum when you need it to ask for more. Again, there is no silver bullet, but if you have a regular mode of communication and a relationship with Finance, they are more willing to listen when you need their help.
6. Managing "Product Quality Issues" Internally: Embedded Services Organizations often find themselves doing work to overcome a bug in the product they support rather than doing the consulting work they were hired to do. In some cases, the level of product quality issues (PQI) is fairly benign. In other cases, services is working with a difficult product with a lot of bugs and issues. In one organization that I managed, the amount of time we were spending addressing product issues in our projects was having a dramatic impact on our ability to complete work on time, which affected customer satisfaction, practice revenues and margins, and our ability to manage our resources and project schedules. The solution? We added a "PQI" task to all projects, set some ground rules for how/when to use it (including some governance to avoid abuse), and reported this time regularly to our Product Management and Engineering partners, as well as to Finance. This allowed us to 1) more easily get the engineering resources we needed on projects where PQI was an issue, 2) include enough contingency on projects where we expected to have significant PQI time based on historical projects - allowing better resource planning,  and 3) improve employee satisfaction since we gave utilization credit to the consultants for this time. Product management also had more visibility into the issues that were causing the most pain for Services, our partners, and our customers and could prioritize their sustaining efforts accordingly.
7. Measuring and Managing Goodwill Work: Similar to PQI, Services is often called upon by Sales or Executive Leadership to deliver what I call Goodwill Work (free consulting or significantly discounted consulting) to make up for a misstep by sales, support, marketing, or a product issue or to ensure we get that "big deal we really need to make our number this quarter." These requests are often unplanned and urgent, which is a huge problem when we are fully utilized with a 6-8 backlog of work to get done. It is important to track the amount of Goodwill Work you and your team are delivering and reporting that back to management. I have even gone so far as to use historical numbers to budget a certain percent of my teams billable time to Goodwill Work and to develop a model with Sales and Executive Leadership on how it can/should be used, what approvals are needed, and what happens where the budget is fully consumed. Reporting on Goodwill Work gives you a leg to stand on when you need more resources to support a project. Planning and budgeting for it makes the issue transparent and forces the organization to make difficult decisions about when to use it and when not.
8. Mantra: Services Can't Outpace Product: In some cases, I believe that custom services can be used as "paid R&D" where a customer wants a new product feature, it is not on the roadmap, and services has the capability to build it for a fee for the customer. The conversation can go like this, "That feature is scheduled for Q2 next year. You can either wait until then, or we can develop a custom SOW and have our Services organization build it for you now. It will cost you $500,000 (or what ever), and will be made available to all customers as soon as it is fully tested." Some customers will feel it is worth the money to get the feature now. Others will simply decide to wait. In some organizations, the Services team does not have the skills to take on such an effort, and the mantra must be "Services cannot outpace product." In other words, sales cannot sell custom development of any kind without knowing that Product Management and Engineering, not Services, is prepared to support the effort - for a fee or not. (Please see last week's post on working with Sales to get what you need.) Assuming this mantra is communicated and well understood, and the right Services Engagement processes have been defined and are followed, surprise custom engagements should be few and far between.
9. Marketing and Sales Can Influence But Cannot Define What Services Will Deliver: Years ago, I worked for a small, but fast growing product company. We came out with a new product and Marketing, in a vacuum, developed a "packaged offering" that includes five days of Professional Services. Every time a sales rep sold this new product, Services was attached. Awesome...? On one hand, I was very pleased that Marketing and Sales understood the need and value of Services and included us in the package. On the other hand, I was scared to death when the Sales team was educated on this new package and I had never been brought into the discussion - what exactly are we expected to do in five days? As I dug in, my biggest fear was confirmed. Marketing designed a five-day engagement that could never, ever be delivered in five days. Their number one concern was developing a packaged offering that met a price point that Sales could sell, but they built something that could not be delivered in the time they committed. My margin would be impacted, I'd need to adjust my pipeline/backlog model to include a multiplier to ensure we captured the right resource needs for scheduling and capacity planning, and customers would be very disappointed when the work took 10-15 days and their deadlines were missed. A few failed projects and unhappy customers later, and Marketing learned why they needed to engage with Services when defining new offerings. From then on out, no Services offerings were defined without input and approval from Services.
10. The Role of Services Must Be Understood Across the Organization: Are we a profit center? If yes, no PQI, no Goodwill, no discounts...period. Every decision is made based on our ability to drive revenue and margin. Alternatively, Are we an engine to drive product adoption and satisfaction? If yes, we need ground rules for all the items listed above, but we focus less on driving margin and more on the overall contribution Services makes to the corporation. The challenge comes in when Finance sees Services as margin business first, and Sales/Marketing wants and needs us to drive adoption and growth within our customer base. My philosophy is that Services Organizations in product companies have to understand that we are a product company and everything we do should be to drive adoption of the product. I believe that Services should be profitable, don't get me wrong, but you won't get 40-60% profit margins AND address PQI and Goodwill on a regular basis. 15-25% is much more likely.

At the end of the day, and as I mentioned above, there is no silver bullet, you can do all this and more and still not get what you need if the value of Services is not understood or appreciated or if the overall health of the business is failing. Regular communication on items such as those above put you in a better position, for sure. You will often need to create strong business cases based on actual data to ultimately get what you need, but if you find that getting what you need is not typical, you should strive to understand if there is a disconnect between what you think the team's role is and what others think it is. 

You should also find allies across the company to help you make your case. Will Sales, Marketing, Product Management, and/or Engineering go to bat for you? If you strive to build the right relationships across the organization, I believe, you will find allies. Sales will want you to be able to deliver what they sell. Product Management and Engineering will want you to be able to take care of issues without the use of their team members. If you don't have strong relationships with the leaders of those groups, you will have a harder time getting what you need.

Its not going to be easy...good luck!