Five Things to Consider Before Implementing a PSA System

Efficiency is the cornerstone of success in this fast-paced business world, especially if your business provides professional services. A Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution may be the key to unlocking this potential. These powerful tools streamline your internal operations, empower your team to excel, and increase the use of automation to ensure your business can move forward toward its goals. 

While a PSA solution helps professional service providers manage their client engagements and business operations it is important to consider five key things prior to implementing a PSA.

1. Assess Current Needs and Pain Points 

The main goal of using a PSA platform is to enhance how organizations deliver their professional services. This includes important aspects such as workflows, processes, data management, team roles, and skills.

While analyzing your workflow and processes, take note of your existing workflows for project management, time tracking, billing, and resource allocations. You should also identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and areas that would be improved with automation. 

For your data management, evaluate how you currently store and access data related to your projects, resources, and clients, and look for inconsistencies that could slow your organization’s reporting and visibility. 

2. Define Goals and Desired Outcomes 

Prior to selecting or implementing a PSA solution, it’s critical to clarify business goals and strategic outcomes. Determining what specific problems you want to solve with your PSA is key, whether it includes improving project efficiency, boosting resource utilization, or streamlining billing workflows (or all of the above). You should determine which key metrics you will use to measure your success, including defining tangible metrics like project delivery time, resource utilization rates, and client satisfaction scores. 

3. Evaluate Technology Landscape 

Before diving in, take time to evaluate your organization’s existing tools and systems. This will help you choose a PSA solution that fits your needs and can integrate with your existing systems. Review your entire tech stack including HR, accounting, CRM, etc. You may not need to integrate some of these systems, but it is crucial to identify the ones that do and ensure the solution you select has the ability to integrate.  

4. User Adoption and Training 

Selecting the right team to lead the implementation and manage the new PSA system is critical for user adoption and ongoing success.  This includes a team that will prepare the company for the transition to a new system, clearly communicating the benefits of implementing it, leading the training and user adoption, and addressing potential concerns. 

It’s important to offer training and ongoing support to ensure your employees have adequate knowledge to maximize system adoption and proficiency. Evaluate the ongoing support option offered by the PSA vendors and determine whether you need additional support until your team is capable of fully utilizing the PSA system. 

5. Cost and ROI 

When it comes to cost and ROI it’s important to determine your budget for a new system implementation and integration. If the vendor selected provides an out-of-the-box (OOTB) product, pricing on licensing is pretty straightforward. If the selected vendor provides a customized product there will be costs on top of licensing for those customizations. It’s important to fully vet vendors to understand clearly what comes OOTB vs. what will need to be customized. Additionally, there may be other costs associated with integration, data transfers, and ongoing maintenance. 

Once you’ve determined your budget and how much a PSA system implementation will cost, your next step should be determining your Return on Investment (ROI). This includes estimating potential cost savings and revenue gains from the improved efficiency and automation that come with the PSA system. 

Additional Considerations 

Now that you’ve defined your needs and pain points, it’s time to select a product. There are many, many PSA solutions out there and one may be a better fit for your size business or the industry in which you work. Use tools like Capterra or G2 to compare different solutions where you can match your previously defined needs with the solution’s offerings. 

Selecting a PSA solution should not be a quick decision. This new system will greatly impact how your business operates so give the decision the time and attention it deserves. There is so much to consider, but we’ve outlined ALL the important features you need to think about and vet to help make the decision-making process a little easier:  

• Usability: Ease of set up, customization, use, administration, and customer support
• Functionality: Project management, issue/risk management, budget/actuals, client collaboration, client reports, and project reporting
• Program/Portfolio Management: Customer profiles, resourcing management, time tracking, resource forecasting, skills management, and portfolio management
• Financial Management: Project budgets, revenue recognition, revenue forecasting, revenue actuals, margin/profitability, invoicing, and billing
• Quoting: Scope (LOE), price/product/discounts, pre-sales deal analysis, statement of work (SOW)
• Integrations: What systems will it integrate with CRM, ERP, HRIS, etc. 
• Platform: business process automation, 360° data visualization (sales/projects/billing), analytics/KPIs, reporting, dashboards, data migration, performance, scalability, customization & configuration, security & compliance

Partner With 5P

There is quite a bit of work to do before selecting and implementing a PSA (not to mention ongoing administration and maintenance) and if it’s too much for your team to take on, consider partnering with a professional consulting firm to ensure you select and implement a PSA system that is truly the best fit for your business. 

At 5P Consulting, we can partner with you or do all the heavy lifting ourselves with our skilled team of solution and business architects, data experts, and program managers. We can help define business needs, select or recommend a product, and lead the implementation, data migration, integration, and much more. We are here to help you get the most out of your PSA for long-term, impactful improvement. Contact us today.