Professional Services Automation
Professional Services Automation
Planview’s Professional Services Automation solution streamlines the engagement process from opportunity to revenue recognition, reducing operational costs and delivery time. An integrated technology ecosystem allows for dynamic engagement planning that creates visibility across the portfolio, maintains alignment with business partners, and can be optimized for any type of business model.
Overview
Services organizations of all types face the difficulty of delivering quickly and consistently while utilizing different types of business models and work methodologies. Planview’s Professional Services Automation solution focuses on connecting all aspects of the engagement process and establishing full visibility across a portfolio of work. This creates a delivery process that is flexible and tailored to the business model, simultaneously increasing margins and decreasing cycle time. The result is an end-to-end services lifecycle that is optimized for profitability, with accurate forecasting that drives consistent delivery and effective decision making, giving your services organization the competitive edge. The individual capabilities that make up this interconnected solution have been organized into four categories below based on their stage within the engagement process.
This stage is focused on creating clearly defined and measurable objectives, aligning corporate strategy to professional services efforts. These objectives enable leaders to effectively track performance, allowing processes to become streamlined and optimized over time, which leads to consistently faster time-to-value and increased margins. Objectives can be set at different organizational levels and tracked at each stage of the engagement process.
Capabilities in the planning stage align the pipeline of opportunities to engagements with effective forecasting. Planning and work software are integrated for efficient project intake and creation, allowing for a faster sales cycle, while capacity is organized using a flexible staffing approach that allows for maximum bookings. Financial planning is tied to the type of business model for optimized margins, with governance checkpoints to ensure engagement profitability and success.
Capacity and Staff Planning
This capability supports flexible staffing and scheduling based on changing demand, analysis of how active and incoming projects impact staffing and capacity, and visibility into the resource requirements for upcoming opportunities and projects to ensure a balanced and efficient work capacity.
Read moreRevenue Planning
This capability supports the planning and management of financial information for professional service engagements and the monitoring of their financial performance.
Read moreServices Portfolio Planning
This capability enables effective planning for service organizations through revenue forecasting and a flexible staffing approach, so that the right resources are assigned to the right projects and delivery occurs on customer timelines.
Read more
In the delivery stage, capabilities leverage the progress made in the planning stage for effective execution. Connected work tools allow teams to operate in traditional, agile, or hybrid methodologies while maintaining consistency and line-of-sight from above. Work and resource assignments are optimized for maximum profit, time and expenses are tracked, and costs are actively managed, giving leaders the ability to quickly identify issues and adjust to changes.
Revenue and Cost Management
This capability supports the continuous monitoring of costs and revenue associated professional services engagements, allowing project managers to track their margin against both the original budget estimate and current revenue forecast.
Read moreProfessional Services Resource Management
This capability supports the viewing and managing of the entire resource pool, enabling the assignment of the right resources at the right time for more efficient and profitable project delivery across all engagements.
Read moreProfessional Services Work Management
This capability provides managers the ability to develop a services work plan, view and manage all work details, define and classify risks, issues, and change requests, and standardize delivery and project templates to create repeatable engagement success.
Read moreProject Team Delivery
This capability provides teams a collaborative, productivity-focused workspace with integrated Kanban boards, as well as a centralized document management solution. Key project status and KPI information is sent to project managers and the portfolio for reporting and analysis.
Read moreAgile Team Delivery
This capability empowers your team to execute work according to their preferred methodology and processes with customizable Kanban boards. Integration of agile team tools is supported so your team can work how they want while seeing all planned and pre-planned work.
Read more
The results stage focuses on effectively tracking engagements through revenue recognition and leveraging that data to further enhance processes. Integrating work and financials allows effort to be effectively captured and sent to customers in a quick and streamlined billing and revenue recognition process. Performance analytics and reporting provide insight into data such as utilization, expenses, and portfolio analysis from the full services lifecycle, allowing for continuous and iterative improvement over time.
Additional Resources
- This solution demo gives an overview of Planview’s Professional Services Automation solution and its supporting capabilities.
- Learn how to connect your services organization in this integrating PSA systems article.