Employee Spotlight: Product Manager, Reporting & Analytics

In this blog series, we’re going behind the scenes with the individuals who make Kantata successful — celebrating the work they’re doing to transform client outcomes through purpose-built solutions. In this third installment, we’re spotlighting Mark Clewett, Product Manager: Reporting and Analytics at Kantata.

Question: What is your role at Kantata?

Answer: I work very closely with customers, through our Enterprise Advisory Board, and I also work directly with the development team. My focus is on operational reporting and strategic analytics. I’m helping to develop the roadmap for strategic initiatives like the rollout of our Analyzers, which are best practice suites of strategic views and dynamic filters that embed Tableau in Kantata.

Question: In a nutshell, what would you say is the purpose of data analytics for services businesses?

Answer: Firstly, analytics help people to be more realistic. In business — as in life — I think people do tend to take a rather optimistic view. There is the rare occasion that you meet people who are overly pessimistic, but that seems to be less common. Being overly optimistic in business — specifically when it comes to forecasting — can lead to reduced accuracy and applicability. The most valuable forecasts are based on accurate and up-to-date project data — including any shifts in close dates, missed milestones, or changes in scope. Reporting and analytics provide context to current project data and inform forecasting by monitoring trends and bringing data points together. Reporting and data add a dose of reality and help to challenge people’s assumptions that everything is going according to plan.

Secondly, analytics offer insight into how to do things better. Services businesses tend to make the same mistakes, and it’s always a challenge to learn lessons during or after delivering a project. Analytics can bring further insights to the surface before it’s too late. The data and analytics in The Kantata Professional Services Cloud provide visibility into the current and future state of the business, and help our customers deliver services more repeatedly, profitably, and predictably.

Question: What do you regard as the most important values in a professional context?

Answer: Trust, integrity, and honesty. Never be afraid to give a customer bad news. Don’t try to paper over the cracks — the truth always comes out in the end. If something is going wrong, then it is best to discuss it openly. You can then work together to come up with an alternative plan, reschedule, or if the problem is impossible to fix, pull out of the engagement. I also think it is important to keep your focus on the customer, and not to lose sight of what you are doing for them.

Question: Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you came to be working for Kantata?

Answer: I got my first computer when I was 14, back in the early 1980s — it was a BBC Micro, one of the first widely available home computers in the world. I was fascinated by it and went on to study Computer Science at Manchester University. I think the first job interview I had after leaving Uni in 1989 was the only one I have ever had — since then I have worked with the same network of people. I first worked with what became the Kimble team in 1998, when I started working as a consultant for Fulcrum — a consulting firm set up by Mark Robinson, one of Kimble’s co-founders. Later I worked for Edenbrook, which Mark also founded. Edenbrook was acquired by Hitachi and I continued to work there as a director for a decade, before joining Kimble in September 2019. Kimble and Mavenlink merged in 2022, and that’s how I ended up at Kantata.

Question: What hobbies do you have?

Answer: I live in the English countryside with my family, in an area known as the Peak District. I am a fair weather cyclist but I do try to get out quite regularly on my bike over the hills and dales. Through the pandemic, it helped a lot having all that on our doorstep.

Final Thoughts

Keep your eye out for the next installments to this blog series where we get to know more members of the Kantata team! You can find the previous spotlight, on Lauren Leonard, Vice President of Solutions Engineering, here.

Want to learn more about Kantata?

Click here to discover how The Kantata Professional Services Cloud takes professional services automation to a new level with purpose-built cloud software created specifically to solve the challenges faced by services organizations.