Project Management for Professional Services in the slow economy

I recently came across an interesting article from Nestor Arellano about project management during our troubled economic times. The author concludes that with the current slow economy, now is the best time to focus on project management.  You can read the original article here.

This makes a lot of sense, especially if you happen to be a project based business – as most Professional Services Organizations (PSO) are. Good examples of PSOs can be lawyers, IT consulting shops, architecture design house, PR and Media consulting firms. For such businesses, project management helps reduce inefficiencies in the business processes. So with new business being harder to find, PSO’s want to squeeze as much profit from what’s already in the pipeline and get more bang from the buck.

Now the question is, how can project management squeeze more profit? If you think about it, project management can help a PSO in the following 3 ways:

• Manage projects in the best manner possible.
• Help reduce their revenue leakage.
• And optimize company resources.

Let’s take a closer look at the first point. A project management solution can help a PSO understand projects better by breaking down all the associated tasks, the resources needed and the milestones that lead to project completion. This may sound all very obvious, but when a PSO is handling many projects from various customers, the lines between projects, tasks, resources and milestones become a bit too blurred. A project management solution helps add clarity to the picture and increase project completion success.

With better projects management comes more revenue for the organization. Revenue is achieved through billable hours of resources, employees and consultants. With intertwining project work and simultaneous tasks it becomes hard to manage all billable work hours and assign them back to clients. With a project management system that handles time tracking and gives detailed reporting, this reduction in revenue leakage can be achieved. So each worked hour is traced back to a client and actually billed for.

And at the end all this leads to resource optimization. So if Larry is great at working on creative projects and Melissa is great on people skills, than why not let them work on tasks they are good at? But without a good project management solution you won’t know who is good at what, especially when your team is large and you work on many different tasks. You know the old saying, play to your teams advantage – that’s exactly what you can do by optimizing your resources.

These are the  type of business challenges we have learned to address with our project management system for the professional services organization. With the downturn in the economy, it’s more imperative than ever to optimize business processes to reduce waste and get more bang for the buck - And that’s exactly what Severa can help a PSO with.

Zaki Usman, Director of Marketing at Severa Inc.