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What passes for your project management and time tracking system is a hodge podge of multiple spreadsheets, paper documents and applications.  Rekeying of information causes errors and slows down invoicing to a glacial pace.  Tracking profitability at the project level is nearly impossible and requires manual calculations.  It’s difficult to calculate payroll and commissions.  Staff and management have poor visibility into resource scheduling, which is manual and time-consuming.   Multiple data silos exist throughout your company.  Duplicate records make data analysis difficult.  It’s hard to determine what work has been performed by particular staffers and how long it took them. 

All this leaves you with poor communication between departments, inconsistent business processes, revenues not captured, reduced margins, missed sales opportunities, and a costly infrastructure to maintain. And that's not mentioning the impact on customers and customer service!

If this sounds all too familiar, there’s hope. Make your CRM the cornerstone and  repository for all client and project information.  Embed extensive project management functions directly into Sage CRM or Sage SalesLogix.  Capture time and expenses through a single system and proactively access, analyze and manage project tasks, resources and associated costs and revenues.  Such a system will unite once-siloed departments, expanding their views into work, clients, and project profitability. 

Professional Services companies must recognize that project management is an essential and naturally intertwined part of Customer Relationship Management.   Properly managing deliverables, timeframes, and budgets will determine customer contentment and your success.  Streamlining your service engagements, while serving your customers well, will allow you to scale your service operations efficiently.

It’s all too logical to build project management within your CRM system.  Information captured during the sales process easily feeds the project record.  Information that serves sales pipeline management will also serve the project team.  Your CRM database becomes the perfect container for your service business.

Project Management for Professional Services 
Professional Services companies would do best by defining projects based on their service delivery model.  All projects have a start and end date with tasks in between that will define the project.  Make sure you capture the project attributes that you will need to efficiently report to the customer and internally manage resources assigned to projects.

Follow these steps to effective project management:  
 
1.  Make sure you can measure what you manage.  Create a simple process to gauge resource and time management against the project tasks that comprise the project.  This will give you an internal measurement of each project’s status and how well you are delivering against milestones and the overall project budget.

2.  Use project templates. Create templates for the specific types of projects you engage in.  Create workflows for project types and define checklists for specific project tasks.  This will facilitate internal communication and accelerate standard project creation in the future.   

3.  Utilize resources.  Define a project team for every project and make it easy to capture the efforts provided by each team member.  This will give you a simple way to measure actual versus estimated time for any project task.  Providing visibility into estimated hours will also set internal expectations for time management and allow you to readjust estimates when appropriate.

Delivering projects on-time and on-budget is obviously key to your and your customers’ health.  So ask yourself:  Is project management a key part of our CRM system?  If not, what steps should we take immediately?      

1. Can you easily, and in real-time, determine non-performing and under-performing projects and resources based on profitability?
2. Do you spend time and money on salaried staff to manage timesheets and expense reports?
3. Does it take too long to compile and bill for out-of-pocket expenses?
4. Do you know when your staff is performing out-of-scope project work that should be captured for additional  billing?
5. Does your staff spend time on projects that is not captured for cost analysis, such as email time, phone calls, meetings, etc.?

Manage more than projects.  Manage dollars and profitabilty from within your CRM system.  To find out how, request TimeLinx's latest white paper.

It seems obvious, almost a cliche: Align your business processes and technology to eliminate silos of information across departments and improve collaboration.  Yet SPI says firms are slow to react.  Here's a quick litmus test to see how your organization is doing:  Is your time and expense information spread across spreadsheets, applications and custom databases, forcing error-prone and time consuming data re-entry?  

Reduce the number or redundant systems into one to create transparency across your entire Service Delivery LifeCycle.  

According to Software Performance Insight, "To improve communication and sales visibility many professional services executives invest in CRM to provide some level of visibility to executives."  However, SPI Research found that very few of these organizations actually integrate their CRM with core financials or professional services automation (PSA).  "This lack of integration creates inefficiency within the PSO, as resource managers and consultants alike lack the visibility into future work or the skill required to assure they can deliver quality services on a timely basis. For PSOs that do integrate both CRM and PSA with the core financial solution, the benefits are both quantifiable and lucrative."