CHAPTER 1
1. Facilitates a Seamless Handoff from Sales
Why it's important
Your sales team fought hard to win the new customer for your business, so you don’t want to lose any time getting the engagement started, or lose any key information stored on the opportunity.
By leveraging automation based on the criteria on your opportunity or CPQ line items you can pick the right template from your library to allow your team to follow best practices. Automation can also pass along key information from the sales cycle to the project such as details about the client and if the project is fixed price or T&M.
How you benefit
- Seamless connection from sales to project delivery keeps everyone on the same page
- Follow best practices by leveraging templates
- Avoid double entry of data and information
- Provide real-time visibility for your Customers, Sales & Account Teams of Project Progress
CHAPTER 2
2. Mixes agility with client delivery dates
Why it's important
To be successful, your professional services team’s projects need to balance fixed delivery dates to meet your client expectations, along with a level of agility so that your team can deliver customer value in the most efficient manner possible.
Water-Scrum-Fall projects combine the best of waterfall and agile projects together in a seamless client experience.
How you benefit
- A project methodology that works like your team does in the real world
- Manage delivery timelines with traditional task management, but maximize customer value by adding agile sprints directly into your overall plan
- Prioritize work in your sprints according to your client’s goals and requirements
CHAPTER 3
3. Lets you find the person with the right skills
Why it's important
As your team grows in number it becomes increasingly harder to keep track of what skills your team has, who has upcoming PTO and what people are assigned to in the coming weeks.
Without knowing this information your resources may become double booked, putting your delivery timelines in jeopardy. You are also hit by an inability to know when you can take on new projects, either reducing your utilization metrics or making false promises to your new customers on when you can deliver.
How you benefit
- Keep projects on schedule driving customer satisfaction
- Use your team more efficiently, increasing your resource utilization rates
- Know when your team can take on more work, to keep the whole business growing
CHAPTER 4
4. Standardizes your Client Meetings
Why it's important
Ever run a successful client-facing project without holding a meeting with your client? Didn’t think so!
Meetings are a critical part of a successful professional services engagement, so you should look for a tool that incorporates meeting templates and minutes capture into its core workflow.
How you benefit
- Automate creation of the right meeting agenda at the right time during your project
- Standardize meetings across your team based on best practices
- Onboard new team members faster with meeting coaching notes
- Share meeting minutes with your customers stakeholders, keeping everyone on the same page
CHAPTER 5
5. Milestone Driven Invoicing & Rev Rec
Why it's important
Finances, and more specifically income is the lifeblood of your company. The key role of your PSA team is to facilitate income flowing in on a timely basis. Income can come from your professional services itself and also the recognition of revenue for the supply of other products or services.
Implementing a solution that ties revenue recognition and invoicing to a milestone process allows you to have a repeatable process that will stand up to any auditing.
How you benefit
- Consistent process-driven metrics so you can back up your data in any financial year end audits
- Automated real-time updates, no delay in getting invoices out quickly
- Accurate revenue recognition reporting and projections
CHAPTER 6
6. Utilization & Billability
Why it's important
Your team are one of the most expensive line items on your monthly budget, so it’s important to know that you are utilizing them in an effective manner and don’t have staff sitting idle, so you need a solution which gives you resource utilization by individual, team and division.
Equally important from any solution is the ability to measure billability so you know when you are charging customers and when you are giving services away for free.
How you benefit
- Track billable vs non billable work across your teams
- Measure utilization of individuals, teams, and business units, on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis
- Report on all the key utilization and billability metrics in real time so you can take action to continually outperform your competition
CHAPTER 7
7. Health Trends across all your Engagements
Why it's important
As the manager of a team engaging with multiple customers simultaneously, being able to see the health of each project at a glance allows you to pre-emptively direct your team’s resources to solve issues before they derail your customer’s onboarding experience in a negative way.
Being able to choose which health metrics to track, such as customer, financial and timeline health puts you in the box seat for running a successful professional services department.
How you benefit
- Provides your executives with an easy way to visualize the status of all your client engagements at once
- Trend arrows show if you’re heading in the right or wrong direction
- Drill into project details to take remedial action quickly and get the relationship back on track
CHAPTER 8
8. Always available KPI Reporting
Why it's important
Collecting data is one thing but presenting it to your management team in a manner that lets them make informed decisions to improve the business is another.
That’s why you need your PSA solution to come with not just a set of out of the box reports but is also customizable by your business users, so all the reports and dashboards that your executives need to make decisions to drive your business forward are always at hand.
How you benefit
- Report on all your KPIs in real time, 24 hours a day from any device
- Visual dashboards with drill-down capabilities to the underlying details
- Configurable to your unique business needs
- Scheduled email updates of your key reports
CHAPTER 9
9. Online Training & Certifications
Why it's important
When you invest in a solution it’s typically the start of a multi-year relationship with the vendor and the solution. Over time, new releases will roll out and your team will change as people move roles and you bring on new hires.
So, you need a vendor with a strong online training solution to keep your staff up to date and onboard new employees. Look for a vendor with training broken out by roles, and one with a certification program, so you can measure your team’s training effort.
How you benefit
- Keeps your team informed of the benefits your business can get from updated versions of solutions
- Gets your new hires up to speed quickly on your key business solutions
- Certification programs let you find qualified staff with pre-existing competence in your onboarding solution
