Who owns X project? What’s the status of X? How’s X project going?
You and other management consulting leaders are all too familiar with these often-asked questions. As consulting firms face increased competition, a constrained talent pool and greater global regulatory accountability, real-time insights into the business and current projects are a necessity. Your teams should not — and cannot — afford to spend hours bogged down tracking projects and managing deliverables.
Wouldn’t it be nice if all those statuses were automatically updated and delivered straight to you?
Thankfully, a professional services automation (PSA) solution provides those real-time insights, sharing business and project data from across the organization in one location, as well as automates everything – from project management to contact management to timekeeping. A PSA solution is the best tool you can adopt for your management consulting firm. You’ll easily gain better visibility into current and future work, which in turn helps you increase your firm’s productivity, grow faster and improve profitability.
Here’s how your management consultant firm can get the job done right with PSA:
- Keep all project fundamentals under one roof
Whether your firm focuses on digital transformation projects or research on environmental impact, all consulting firms have one thing in common: project-based work, which often means many moving parts. It’s inefficient for executives and other team members to constantly check in with one another on project statuses when they should instead focus on growing the business and better servicing their clients. PSA platforms allow you to see all project data and updates in real time and in one place, which lessens the strain on employees for admin activity and data analysis - Get real-time insights and run your business better
Working in the consulting industry, you already understand that transparency and insights are key to a successful business. Executives and owners need to see which projects are coming in, which are over-budget or behind schedule, and which consultants are over-committed. All of this data helps inform good decisions quickly and keeps your firm running profitably. In fact, companies have improved on-time project delivery by 9 percent with a PSA solution. It’s impossible to make educated decisions about the future without looking at current and past data. Having real-time insights into your business’s financials and projects available anytime from anywhere means you can take action on things that haven’t even happened yet and drive positive outcomes for your business. - Allow employees to make smarter decisions for clients whenever, wherever
The consulting industry has shifted in recent years, requiring firms to be more agile and react to constant change faster. This trickles down to teams and changes how consultants work and collaborate with one another. As younger generations enter the workforce and technology evolves, how teams use technology also changes: Forrester revealed 45 percent of information workers rely on mobile with clients and partners.
Consulting firm Kirkman Company, for example, whose 75+ consultants are predominantly mobile and remote, needed to enable real-time information and collaboration so their teams could make decisions for their clients. A PSA solution built for mobile meant their team could update information, remain engaged and make decisions from anywhere. Those real-time insights led to ownership and accountability to make better-informed decisions faster, which leads to the next point… - Promote ownership of project outcomes
Ivar Davids, co-founder and managing partner at Kirkman Company, had challenges developing guidelines and some basic controls to ensure business integrity and continuity. “We need to give our team freedom to maneuver, to be on the track to desired outcomes in a changing environment,” said Davids. “At the same time, we need to be sure that our clients’ goals are safeguarded and our own governance standards are met.”
Kirkman Company chose to use VOGSY, and was then able to see everything they needed in one place. No one needs to wait for a monthly report, there’s much less strain on their admin activity and their employees are keeping their data accurate.
The real-time insights afforded by PSA solutions give you both the knowledge and time you need to boost your consulting firm’s competitive edge.
Does your consulting firm need help keeping track of all your project deliverables and business performance? Learn how management consulting firm Kirkman Company used VOGSY to tackle this challenge.
