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Assessing Services Visibility – An Organizational Checklist

- by Kevin Bury, Vice President & COO, QuickArrow

Complete, Accurate Visibility Is Critical

Services organizations need clear insight into all project-related metrics and materials when it’s time to make business decisions. But how do you gain visibility into vital facts, figures, and data without spending hours searching for or manually aggregating it?

Causes of Poor Visibility

The challenge of getting clear visibility into your services operations stems from the level of automation surrounding the services organization’s business processes. Many companies develop homegrown systems, which typically consist of emails for data collection and elaborate spreadsheets for tracking and analysis.

While these point solutions may be readily available on your desktop, they don't automatically integrate with each other — or with existing front- and back-office systems — to create automated business processes. Manual processes must be used to enter and transfer data from each of the individual systems into central data reporting and analysis spreadsheets. This requires hours of work, and must be done any time the data becomes outdated — potentially on a weekly or even daily basis. And, as with any manual process, mistakes and data inaccuracies occur, further compounding the problem.

The result is a patchwork system that offers very limited visibility into services operations and that carries high ramifications, including:

• Inaccurate revenue forecasts resulting in unpredictable and unrepeatable results
• Project over-runs in budget and schedule which affect profitability and client satisfaction
• Poor control over resources and low utilization rates
• Low employee productivity from repeated collection of data and recalculation of reports
• Missed opportunities to optimize services operations due to large time delays in reporting

Desired Visibility Into Services Operations

While a point approach may suffice for organizations with only a few billable resources, the costs and pains associated with the lack of a true Professional Services Automation solution become unbearable in organizations larger in size.

What Is Your Level of Services Visibility?

How are you operating today? Is your services revenue forecast as accurate as you require? Do you know which of your projects are most profitable? Are you able to proactively identify all of the opportunities for improvement, and then make the necessary strategic and tactical changes to maximize profits?

The following Services Organization Visibility Checklist is designed to help you assess the level of visibility you have into your services organization. Please answer the following questions based on your organization.

Optimal Services Visibility

How did your organization score on the Services Organization Visibility Checklist? Do you have full insight into the strengths and weaknesses of your services organization? Do you have visibility into all of the project-related metrics and materials you require to make informed business decisions? Is the information you need readily available at your fingertips?

Manually updating spreadsheets to track projects and resources is a laborious and tedious way to manage your services organization. Spreadsheets are great as an analytical tool, but not an effective way to run your operations. A more automated solution, such as a Professional Services Automation (PSA) application, can provide your firm with a streamlined and efficient means to run your business. A PSA solution provides unprecedented levels of visibility into your services organization.

Automation Benefits

Financial Visibility

Greater visibility into your operations gives you the ability to analyze projects in greater depth and identify profitability by client, project types, and employees and enables more effective bottom-line business optimization. Additionally, you can identify and control over-budget projects sooner so that steps can be taken to resolve issues and maximize profitability. 

Project Visibility

A Professional Services Automation solution allows you to proactively track and analyze projects. It provides instant access and visibility into key project-related metrics including Backlog, Project Profitability, Effective Bill Rate, Billings to Date, and Revenue Forecast.  Sales forecasts become more accurate because they reflect revenue exactly as it will be recognized, allowing increased predictability and influence over revenue streams. Services pipeline reports can combine both opportunities and ongoing projects in a single report, including integration into CRM systems, enabling services personnel to plan better and execute more projects than previously possible. And by providing clients real-time visibility to project status and key metrics, client satisfaction and additional repeat business is generated.

PSA Project Monitor

A good automation solution should also provide a Document Repository to store, manage, organize, search, and retrieve all project-related materials, such as statements of work (SOWs), intellectual property (IP) documents, contracts, resumes, templates, etc.

Resource Visibility

More accurate views into opportunities, projects, and resource availability enable better resource leveling, increased visibility into future staffing skills and availability requirements, and increased resource utilization. Additionally, views into external contractors' and partners' resource skills and availability, as well as the ability to track their time, expenses, and performance, allows them to be seamlessly leveraged to assist in the delivery of services.

PSA Resource Manager

Executive Dashboards

Executive Dashboards offer real-time visibility into your operations and enable faster, more accurate planning and decision making.  Executive dashboards should allow you to:

• Have key business metrics delivered to your desktop
• Customize calculations and formatting for multiple reports designed to measure Resource Utilization, Project Profitability, Revenue Forecasting, etc.
• Analyze information with charts and pivot tables
• Refresh data securely in real-time
• Create and automatically send role-based reports to Executives and Project Managers within your organization

PSA Executive Dashboard

Summary

Visibility is a necessity for building and managing a successful services organization. Faster and more accurate planning, increased revenues and profitably, and higher resource utilization are all direct results from increased visibility. To achieve the highest level of visibility into your services organization, implement solutions that provide information that is formatted to your exact requirements and automatically updated, so you can focus on the strategies to take your organization to the next level.