As your organization prepares to spend significant money on new tools to help you better manage projects, how prepared are you to achieve a return on this investment? Bradford K. Clark confirms a 15% to 21% improvement in project execution and delivery costs in a 1997 study done at the University of Southern California by moving the project management maturity level up one level. William Ibbs, UC Berkley, confirms similar results in consulting and engineering firms.
Professional Services Automation empowers the Professional Services organization by providing enhanced, automated, and integrated capabilities to set up, manage, control, and report on client engagements. The span of PSA includes the initial opportunity identification through the proposal and planning processes, staffing and executing the work, collection of costs, recognition of revenue, invoicing the client, knowledge management, and collaboration with the internal team and the client representatives. In addition, PSA provides a single end-to-end, scalable system to manage the professional services business. This allows for the company’s growth, reduces response time during the sales cycle, allows the PMO to foster innovation and increases the quality of projects, better management consulting employees and subcontractor resources, and integrates intellectual capital management with the delivery of professional services.
Four success measures for your PSA implementation are Revenue Production, Productivity Enhancement, Risk Reduction, and Improved Cycle Times. In all cases, these should be valid measurement criteria to determine success and measure the ROI of your investment. As you prepare to implement new tools for your organization, consider establishing a baseline across your firm. Assess where the organization is before you begin. Leverage this knowledge to help focus change management and training efforts where the return will be most significant. Build a business case with specific targets and ROI measures. Develop a plan to move your organization up to the project management maturity level, implementing only functions and features needed for success. Plan training programs to increase the understanding and skills of your Project Management team, not just in the tools but in the application of the tools to better manage your projects. Enable additional features and functions as your project management team matures.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can assist in assessing the present state of the business and prescribing a course of action. Real-time monitoring of KPIs allows maximization of performance over the shortest period. Oracle Project Management provides hundreds of KPI measurements for utilization by your team.Â. Remember to be SMART in your use of these essential tools:
Specific, Measurable Achievable Realistic, Timely
Plan on updating the maturity measurement of your organization regularly to determine where you have been successful in your improvement and identify areas of opportunity for future improvement.
