Understanding PSA software
As you and your team build your business, you’ll want a single, overarching solution that helps you automate certain programmes and tasks while also offering the option to pivot long- and short-term business and financial goals whenever necessary. By collating several systems into one platform, a professional service automation (PSA) software tool can help organise your team and business for the future.
What is professional service automation software?
PSA software is a full-suite solution designed to assist many teams in your organisation, serving as the main hub for your business activities. Traditionally, components of PSA software were a part of ERP solutions for large corporations, but as small businesses began to add different types of tools to account for various tasks, PSA software became a natural choice due to its scalability, reduction of manual spreadsheets, and real-time reporting and visibility.
As your professional service software needs to cover a full spectrum of tasks, a PSA tool should be able to:
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Ensure resource supply and future demands can be met.
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Keep track of all revenue, expenses, and profitability analysis through your project accounting.
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Manage, track, and execute day-to-day tasks for a successful, on-time project delivery.
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Know where and how to how to allocate resources that assigns the right person to the right task at the right time.
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Understand the risks and expected margins by servicing parts of the sales cycle.
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Record and automate billing that track actual effort and forecast remaining resource effort.
Adding this software to your current legacy system and tools helps teams manage client engagements throughout the entire project lifecycle. From finding team members to handle particular tasks to managing financials, PSA software centralises your most important client operations so you’re better equipped to adjust and pivot when necessary.
The benefits of PSA software
As your team continues to grow, adding PSA software is critical. Implementing professional service software that’s easy to use serves as a great fit for all service-oriented firms since the main focus is high utilisation rates combined with less non-billable hours—meaning delivering quality work while spending less.
Effective professional service software can help your team:
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Easily manage projects, resulting in faster staffing and higher success rates.
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Provide real-time visibility into team performance and profits.
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Optimise resources to manage time, money, and efforts.
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Improve short- and long-term project margins and business results.
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Reduce hardware maintenance costs.
Since PSA software is a cost-effective solution to add into your organisation, you’ll be saving money as you won’t need to implement or integrate any additional infrastructure. This turnkey software is also designed to be easily configurable for quick accommodation into your legacy systems.
How to choose a viable solution
When selecting your next PSA tool, you need to first understand what you what to achieve. These steps will help you in choosing the right tool for your team.
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Prioritise your goals. Decide on a list of prioritised goals and a phasing strategy so you’re not overwhelmed by the number of tasks to tackle.
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Construct your decision-making process. Frame your decision as how a new PSA can help your business. Ask if you’ll be building your own PSA solution or implementing a commercial product? Will you be deciding between a hosted application or licensed, on-premises deployment? Are you using top of the line products or a suite or platform-based solution?
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Research the market. After deciding what’s most important to you and your team, research the market to narrow your choices to find the best solution.
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Test, test, test. Since PSA software is easy to integrate with little to no training, you can trial run a few tool options to see which might work best for your team.
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Choose the best software for success. Finally, you want to make sure the system you decide on improves your bottom-line performance, specifically in how it can help your organisation financially with little to no effort.
Four keys for a successful PSA implementation
As your next PSA software must incorporate a range of features, it needs to serve as a linchpin for several organisational teams. Ensure that you’re offering teams complete visibility into tasks and actions, to scale and provide maximum output at every stage of the project lifecycle.
The four keys to successfully executing a PSA deployment are:
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Your organisation’s profile. PSA software automates manual processes that current programmes are unable to handle due to the complexities of managing people and tools across multiple projects—while giving you the option to scale if needed. Figure out what verticals your organisation uses and how it can be integrated into your systems.
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Implementation process. After understanding your organisational requirements, you’ll be able to define the configuration of the PSA software you’ll need. Typical implementation periods last for about six to ten weeks.
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Adoption. Shifting to a new way of working may seem both easy and overwhelming. At this stage, it’s essential that all your new users are trained with clear expectations on what professional service automation can provide to your team. And what it cannot.
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Integration. The integration process of PSA software involves several other organisational tools, like project accounting, customer relationship management, and HR systems. Here, you can transfer information from other systems and collate that data into a single PSA solution, keeping track of additional custom work and costs.
Implementing Dynamics 365 Project Operations as your PSA solution
It can be hard to decide when to add PSA to your business. If your team is preparing for rapid growth, both internally and externally, now would be a good time for PSA software. By investing in infrastructure early with a solution that’s able to mesh well and easily adapt to your current operations, your team is able to support the exponential growth that’s sure to come.
Whenever your team grows or demand increases, Dynamics 365 Project Operations offers the capabilities that help improve deal management experiences, optimise resource profitability, track expenses, and collate all the information within tools that managers and decision makers need to succeed.