Planview Professional Services Automation Journey

What is a Connected Services Organization?

Services organizations of all types must move faster than ever with fewer resources to keep up with the pace of business today. At the same time, customers expect quicker delivery and new business models with the same level of quality and consistency. In order to maintain a competitive edge, organizations must streamline and connect their engagement process from opportunity to revenue recognition.

Planview’s PSA solution creates an integrated ecosystem that connects systems, delivery, and the greater strategic organization. Connecting systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, allows information to flow seamlessly from opportunity to revenue recognition. Connecting into the organization makes services a part of the strategic planning lifecycle and establishes visibility and alignment with strategic goals. Connecting the delivery process into this ecosystem optimizes work for the business model, and empowers teams to operate within the methodology that best fits that work, leading to increased efficiency and profit.

The reason to connect lies in the result: a seamless services lifecycle, where forecasting and organizational priorities drive decision-making, and work is streamlined to meet customer expectations with maximized margins. The next step is understanding where you are now and how to optimize towards becoming fully connected.

1. Commit to the process. As with any change, it will take time to see the benefits.
2. Update existing structures to accept change as a constant. Being connected is more than just integrations – it allows organizations to become adaptive as they carry out engagement and work management.
3. Implement governance practices. Establishing visibility and standardizing procedures across all engagements is critical to automating services. Ensure that you have just enough governance and that work is not slowed down by unnecessary processes.
4. Empower your teams to increase process automation and agility. Organizations must embrace differences as the new norm and allow teams to use the delivery methods that best fit the work and business model.
5. Focus on forecasting. Accurately predicting six to eight months into the future is critical for effective planning and optimization.
6. Emphasize resiliency. Disruptions will inevitably occur, so the ability to adapt quickly is crucial.

The Journey to Connected Services

Overcoming Blind Spots

There are three pain points faced by most services organizations: inconsistent delivery, resourcing pressures, and forecasting volatility.

Delivering consistently must be the foundation of any services organization to create customer value, but without connected tools and visibility across engagements, processes cannot be standardized. This inevitably creates delays and bottlenecks, causing revenue leakage and customer frustration. Services organizations have an estimated average dollar value of 41.8M in backlogged revenue, largely caused by delays and long wait times to staff projects.

Resourcing pressures compound this problem, as resources are overutilized and resource managers are forced to scramble to find those with the right skills and availability to complete projects, while disagreements on priorities can lead to internal tension and employee burnout. Organizations that do not use a PSA solution take 3.45 days longer to staff projects, on average.

Inaccurate or incomplete forecasting adds additional difficulty to planning beyond the immediate term as the organization is unable to foresee necessary hiring decisions or provide accurate expectations when intaking new opportunities. Organizations without a PSA solution face an average 26% lower quarterly booking forecast.

The pace of business today further exacerbates these difficulties, as remote delivery creates higher customer expectations for both the speed of response and speed to value. Business models are also changing, leaving behind billing for time to use more profitable subscription models, which require deeper insights across the business.

While your teams will work hard to overcome these challenges, those difficulties will ultimately lead to fewer sales, higher delivery costs, and lost customers. Connecting with a PSA solution is quickly becoming a necessity for service organizations to adapt to the new business environment. For example, in just 5 months, Ricoh Australia saw a 40% increase in productivity by implementing Planview’s PSA solution.

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Traditional PSA Drivers

If your organization is focused only on delivering customer projects, the first step will be creating the foundation of a traditional services model by connecting internal tools and processes, and implementing planning and reporting across the lifecycle. This allows the organization to function as a consistent, independent profit center and increases visibility throughout the organization.

The organization will establish a planning process beginning in the opportunity phase that connects contracts, revenue forecasting, work delivery, and financial management so that services can generate profit as a singular business unit. The focus is the ability to deliver confidently and consistently, assign resources to the work that best utilizes their skills, and accurately forecast expected revenue. For example, Tufin increased their forecasting window from 35 days to 90 days by implementing Planview’s PSA solution.

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The Future of Connected Services

By connecting services, organizations begin actively planning and collaborating around opportunities by tailoring work around the business model. Engagement management takes a step up from contracts to focus on clients, while delivery moves beyond projects and into hybrid delivery methods. Resources can be optimized with visibility into their skills, availability, and utilization, letting them be assigned the work that is most beneficial and profitable. Financial insights allow leadership to optimize margins, and provide an early warning system with relevant data to inform decisions if work plans change.

Together this brings the combined effect of predictable and consistent profit, incorporating new business models and ways of working with the ability accurately forecast and plan for future opportunities. More services are sold as dynamic customer engagement planning and a data-driven approach allow the organization to support informed decision-making when opportunities emerge. End-to-end holistic visibility and connectivity across enterprise applications enable optimal operational efficiency and maximized profit. Overall business is safeguarded by a strong customer engagement model and consistent delivery experience, leading to high retention.

Connectivity makes these business outcomes scalable, allowing the organization to operate at the high velocity required for the modern business cycle, with the agility to adapt quickly and continuously improve as the organization grows. For example, Siemens Energy saved 36,000 in annual hours worked and €2M in cost by connecting at an enterprise level.

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What is a Capability?

To derive real business value, features must be paired with appropriate business processes and reporting. As part of the connected services journey, this is the perfect time to streamline processes, set best practices, and ensure reporting and analytics are in place to correctly understand results. This will prevent overengineering and ensure you're optimizing business value and user experience.

When you’re ready to implement or optimize your capabilities to maximize business value, visit the Planview Capability Framework for more information.

Professional Services Automation Capabilities

Each organization will have a distinct process for how capabilities are implemented and matured. Planview capability maps and journey assessments are used to understand where you are today and what the next steps on your journey will be. Download the Planview PSA Journey Map where you can fill in which capabilities you are using now and which you would like to implement next. To help you as you fill out your map, the journey assessment in the next section will ask questions about how your organization is working today.

Customer Journey Assessment

To understand where you are in maturing your processes and what you want for your next steps, we have compiled an assessment detailing relevant questions around what you are doing today and the areas you are looking to mature. Our customer journey assessment is a tool that will help you map out your journey and understand other areas you'd like to optimize and connect. The questions in the assessment point to principal areas for maturity. There are no correct answers to the questions – only what is right for your organization.

Once your answers are marked, you'll have a visualization of where you are on your journey. This serves to foster discussion around which areas you want to focus on to move the needle forward. In addition to the image below, we've created an interactive survey to take the assessment and create a PDF visualization of the questions and answers to help roadmap your journey: 

PSA Customer Journey Assessment Survey