Professional Services Technology Enablement

PSA software is the flagship business application for professional service firms and aids important objectives.

1. Improve resource management. PSA software aligns client or project requirements with resources that have the needed skills and competencies. Resource optimization, including scheduling, onboarding, collaboration and performance management, is proven to increase staff performance and utilization.
2. Improve project outcomes. PSA systems give project managers more control and visibility with information reporting that flags or forecasts deviations in scope, time, cost, quality or outcomes. It facilitates a standardized approach to the services delivery lifecycle and promotes consistent and automated processes to manage concurrent projects more effectively and in less time.
3. Improve financial margins. Better planning, tighter resource management, process automation and real-time visibility to project progress or variances collectively drive increased resource utilization, fewer missteps and non-billable time, adherence to schedule and the delivery of forecasted objectives.

Research shows the Best-in-Class (top 15 percent) professional service organizations use PSA software to achieve the two overarching customer objectives of improved project quality and client satisfaction, and which in turn lead to the three company objectives of increasing customer acquisitions, customer share, and customer retention.

The PSA application is the system of record for projects. Just as your CRM software delivers a 360-degree customer view, PSA software delivers the 360-degree project view.

Most professional service companies operate departmental applications that are pretty much isolated. They lack process automation outside their boundaries. They use piecemeal technologies that work only for their departmental interests. They harvest much smaller data sets for information reporting and contribute to fragmented customer experiences.

An enterprise-wide professional services technology portfolio, often called a ProServ tech stack, can fix these issues and accelerate company growth.

A tech stack is an integrated platform of applications that collectively improve the user experience, project execution, process automation, information reporting and scale. It defines the optimal combination of integrated growth technologies that most drive client success and company growth. 

Data and analytics make professional service companies smarter. They show how the brand impacts buyer decisions. They demonstrate which campaigns acquire the best leads. They visualize how the salesforce accelerates revenue. And they forecast how project performance impacts margins and client expansion.

They also show when things aren't working. Analytics convert raw data into actionable insights and route those insights to the people that can use them to resolve a variance, implement a course correction, make a timely decision, or take some other informed action.

Research performed for the Business Growth Report found that the highest growth service companies made extensive use of revenue analytics to achieve their results. It also found the three most effective revenue analytics tools are digital dashboards, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence.

Data and analytics provide an early warning system to show when projects are in trouble – well before end of period reporting or when a client raises a complaint.