To be successful your first step is to assess the operational business goals and business process. This will ensure your configuration will meet the demands of your operational business model and achieve the productivity results that a PSA tool should provide.
In today’s world, investing in the right professional services automation software provides the benefits of industry best practices and decreases the costs of maintaining homegrown solutions and manual processes. TOP Step will help you identify your needs and select the right tool to support your business operations.
1. First, we spend the time to fully understand your business by reviewing your current business model, your desired business model, problem areas, and expected growth areas. Results of this step area documented business process model both current and desired.
2. Next, we will work directly with your process owners to identify detailed requirements such as reporting needs, data entry/access limitations, automation and notification, and functional requirements. Each requirement is evaluated for critical need, necessary, or nice-to-have to establish a weighing scheme. The result of this step is a Tool Requirements Matrix to be used in the vendor selection process.
3. In the final step, TOP Step will guide your team through an in-depth requirements ranking and evaluation process to down-select relevant vendors until a final choice is made.
Implementing a Professional Services Automation (PSA) system allows for operational insight by management into everything ranging from detailed, daily activities of your billable resources to quarterly forecasting of backlog. With the flexible reporting features and data capture of your PSA system configured to your business model needs, there is no limit to how you can review your data to make critical business decisions.
TOP Step’s consultants know your business and have in-depth knowledge of the features of your PSA tool. By combining these two, we can help your business to better leverage your existing PSA software to achieve greater operational efficiency and reporting accuracy and enhanced access to new and expanded features.
Unsure of how your use of the PSA Tool fits within your organization? TOP Step can walk you through a Business Efficiency Assessment to review all areas of your business model and make recommendations for configuration changes and additional use of your system.
PSA Tools are continually evolving systems. With regular releases, new features and system enhancements are available based on the requests of the end user community and the product roadmap. Have you limited module usage in your system due to limited availability of features that you need? Now may be the time to review the most recently released features available for your PSA tool.
A short business process workshop reviewing your business model against unused or limited features and functionality may give you new insight into how to expand use of your PSA tool and replace other systems or possibly integrate to other systems. Find out more about how TOP Step provides this service.
Has your company grown? Your initial configuration of your PSA Tool may have included some manual processes that are now becoming cumbersome. A Business Efficiency Workshop will review how you’re using your system and where you can implement additional features or streamline reporting, project management, or invoicing tasks.
Are you growing out of tracking your business using spreadsheets and e-mail? A PSA Tool is a scalable solution starting with a simple configuration, which allows for expanding the feature usage as your company grows. The customer base for PSA solutions ranges from small startups (less than 10 billable resources) to large multi-national corporations. All can use the same system, configured to meet their needs, to run their businesses efficiently.
Are you standardizing your Professional Services methodology? PSA Tools have key project management features to help you build out and complement your methodology, giving you the ability to enforce processes such as timesheet review workflows and project reporting. TOP Step has deep experience and offers best practices in implementing standard project management methodologies using a combination of PSA Tools and operational processes. Find out how TOP Step Consulting provides solutions to help you with building business efficiency.
“Because TOP Step’s methodology focused on our business process first to understand how we would most benefit from a best in class PSA tool, we were able to accelerate our original schedule to deploy the OpenAir system to meet our specific business needs. Within one month we had a system in place that was contributing value to our business operations for Empathy Labs with accurate and readily available information. TOP Step’s expertise in professional services business automation was key to a successful implementation, and they will continue to be a trusted business partner for providing sound advice as we expand our OpenAir system usage.”
- Howard Abrams, Empathy Labs
PS Village: August 21, 2008
By Jodi Cicci
In working with many companies regarding process definition and efficient operational tool usage, I’ve come across a Catch-22 of sorts:
Let’s take the example of a company with well defined processes and looking for a tool to introduce business efficiency and perhaps automation. Tool selection involves evaluating products against defined requirements and making a best fit selection. Then the deployment activities begin and the details of what your tool can and can’t do start modifying your well defined processes.
You need to watch that the tool doesn’t start to dictate your processes. Compromise is good to a point but if the tool cannot handle your processes efficiently or introduces more manual work than you had before the tool, then you may need to revisit your tool selection. Carefully documenting your requirements during the tool selection process and weighting the critical ones that will keep or improve your business efficiency will help you avoid this situation.
What about the example of a company with a robust tool and not using it to its fullest extent. This is the biggest catch-22 area since the tool selection may not have included requirements for these other areas or perhaps included them but with lower priority and weighting. Defining what your processes are should be done first. This may include a complete ‘outside of the tool’ definition or a process that has limited information extracted from the tool. This gives you a base of expectation. Review the tool next to see how much of the process can be accommodated. Details will be revealed about what can and cannot be accomplished or automated. Now the decision is how much of the process will be handled by the tool and how much will continue outside of the tool. Is the tool changing your process? If so, is it in areas that can be compromised? Be careful not to force tool usage and make your process more cumbersome.
Best practices for most tools are available from the product vendor’s Professional Services organization or partners. These are great resources to help you with process definition pertaining to the tool as they’ve worked with many clients that may be in your similar industry.
If your business doesn’t have a set process or is in the middle of redefining process, then you can use the tool to drive a process definition. In this case, you start with the tool and what features it has in certain areas such as resource management, project management, etc. Warning – many products have robust features so you can easily fall into a ‘use it all’ trap. Look at the options and work out a business process that takes advantage of automation, if desired, and good reporting. Whenever I work with companies my emphasis is getting information out of the tool – that typically drives what you need to put into the tool and the details about how to ‘characterize’ this information.
To established business processes from a tool perspective, best practices can be extremely helpful and save you lots of time in initial definition. Business consulting organizations specializing in your particular tool can point out the do’s and don’ts as you define rollout plans and configuration needs.
The result of marrying business process with tool usage should be efficient business operations including data tracking and reporting. Not a test of how many tool features you can use! And definitely not a burden to your end-users!
