| At a glance Having CRM, Resource Management, HRMS, ERP, and a meeting and collaboration tool doesn’t fully equip you to manage your IT project delivery business. Read on to find what you are missing. |
Though Professional Services Automation (PSA) software is finding favor with more and more IT services companies that deliver billable projects, sometimes managers view PSA software as something similar to Project Management Software (PMS).
This article explains how ProductDossier PSA extends your organization’s capabilities beyond project management.
Let’s understand where the comparison between PSA software and a typical PMS ends and what is beyond.
The similarities
Both project management software and ProductDossier PSA provide core tools for project execution. The core tools are:
- Task and milestone creation.
- Phase establishment.
- Dependency management.
- Lead and lag constraints.
- Project calendar preparation.
- Plan versus actual date comparison.
- Critical path calculation.
- Earned value management (EVM).
- Project schedule compression.
- Baseline establishment.
- Percentage completion calculation.
- Automatic status calculation.
Both support agile project methodologies, such as requirement backlogs, project sprints, defects, sprint velocity, and burn-down charts.
Missing in PMS: Task priority setting that aligns work with the organization’s priorities
Most project management software tools don’t let you set task priorities.
In ProductDossier PSA, managers can set preferences among various projects depending on their criticality. They can also prioritize tasks within specific projects. Employees can sort the task assigned to them according to priorities in their ProductDossier PSA workspaces and dashboards.
ProductDossier PSA: beyond the PMS
Here is an overview of various business workflows in IT services companies that ProductDossier PSA integrates and speeds up.
1. Opportunity management: ProductDossier PSA supports all workflows and repositories needed to prepare, change, and approve project proposals. It interconnects CRM, HRMS, and accounting to extract information required for preparing project proposals. High-quality project proposals are essential for winning deals.
2. Project creation: ProductDossier PSA provides the necessary forms, approval workflows, financial setup, and project team setup for creating customer projects. These preliminary activities are essential for orderly project execution.
3. Project health calculation and display: ProductDossier PSA calculates and displays various parameters related to project health. You can customize the parameters. You can schedule automatic health calculations at predefined intervals. Project health provides visibility into financial and non-financial aspects of project performance.
4. Customer billing: ProductDossier PSA supports invoice generation, invoice content generation, effort and bill rates in T&M contracts, billing milestones for fixed-bid contracts, units completed for outcome-based contracts, monthly billing for outcome-based contracts, and even JV entries for ERP integration. ProductDossier PSA improves the accuracy of invoices and prevents disputes with customers.
5. Resource management: ProductDossier PSA integrates resource and timesheet management. It supports resource allocations, deallocations, requests, loading, efficiency measurement, capacity planning, skill and competency tracking, task assignments, hard and soft bookings, resource forecasting, and team structure definition. It also integrates time tracking through timesheet management against the work breakdown structure (WBS), project, and user-defined tasks. It ensures compliance with different countries’ timesheet requirements and allows approval workflows, automatically calculating resource costs.
ProductPossier PSA brings reliability and speed to resource management – a crucial area for IT services companies.
Read more: Resource Allocation for Successful Project Management
Manage shared support services using ProductDossier PSA
6. Risk management: ProductDossier PSA provides extensive risk management capabilities using historical experience.
It supports defining project-level risks, quantitative and qualitative risk analysis, preparing risk heat maps, assigning risk actions, and linking issues with risks. ProductDossier PSA brings rigor to RAID practices through well-tested workflows.
7. Issue management: ProductDossier PSA offers an extensive framework for identifying, creating, and resolving issues. It supports custom workflows for issue resolution, action item assignment, and issue severity and impact analysis. Team members and customers can generate issues within the system.
8. Collaboration tools: ProductDossier PSA provides meeting and document management tools, configurable workflows, business rule definitions, and time-tracking capabilities. Most project management systems don’t offer the above features.
Conclusion
ProductDossier PSA goes far beyond traditional project management software, providing IT service companies with the ability to execute, deliver, and build projects in line with their organizations’ priorities, business goals, and customer requirements.
