Business Empowered
There are plenty of things a project manager has to worry about however for a project manager in professional services organization is concerned about primarily five things. Let's look at those.
Plan Projects, Estimate Cost, Billability and Resources
The most crucial aspect for sustainably growing professional services is margin/profitability of services rendered to customers. The business heads or VP of professional services would take up new projects if the future value or project margins is going to yield positively.
Using ZilicusPM project management software for professional services, project managers can quickly create projects schedule, the financial indicators in project dashboard shows them
ZilicusPM enables project manager to perform timeline, financial, resource assessment even before taking up new projects. This helps management to decide whether to take up new projects or not.
Even further, the portfolio management in ZilicusPM clearly informs project managers and senior management about earned value of portfolio and projects thereof at any given point.
Project Managers Know Exactly Who is Working on What
Any professional services organization would like to optimally allocate, assign its consultants or technical resources such that, their billability, margin remains higher. The biggest challenge they face is to identify whether a given resources is available or occupied.
Many times, your consultants, technical & support professionals are working on multiple projects simultaneously, thereby making them busy/available intermittently.
ZilicusPM Project management software for professional Services helps organizations with two important aspects
Track Overtime and Billable Time
Unless PSO knows how much it is going to cost to deliver projects and how much top-line/review it can generate, it will never be able to remain sustainable. As they say, what gets measured, gets done - but I would say, what gets measured, gets improved.
ZilicusPM project management software for professional services, enables team members to track time worked on project deliverable - tasks, meetings, issues, etc. It is intuitively designed to suggest/prompt you what you should be submitting this week, and how much. Thus for a given project, project managers knows who many hours are tracked (regular or overtime) and what is corresponding billability he/she can expect.
If you have consultants, technical support professionals deployed onsite (to customer location), they would be incurring certain expenses related to stay, travel, etc. Project management system ZilicusPM provides a quick and simple way to track project expenses so that team members can submit expense items, amount, receipts and project manager can review & approve those.
These project expenses gets accounted towards actual cost incurred for a given project, thereby giving you a right picture of project financial.
Check Project Activities in Calendar
Typically consultants working in a professional services check their calendar quite frequently (more of a habit) as they have to work on multiple activities (possibly for multiple clients). So what they would need is reliable, mobile calendar-view of project activities expected from them.
Using ZilicusPM project management software for professional services, whenever any project tasks is assigned to project team members/ project consultants they will receive email notification in their inbox and optionally the task assignment will get added to their calendar so that whenever task is expected to start, they will be reminded.
Optionally there are more email preferences which reminds project team members if their tasks, issues or risks are not completed by expected due/completion date.
Use a Central Platform to Manage Projects
As we are talking to hundreds of customers every week, we realize that they lack a central platform to manage projects, to collaborate. Sending documents, spreadsheet and tasks through email is not a collaboration, unless it is looped back to a central platform.
ZilicusPM project management system for professional services provides you one central place for your project plan, project task update, issues, documents, resource capacity planning, meetings, timesheet, expenses, project reports and dashboard.
Collaborate With Clients - Transparently
The major advantage/plus-point users of ZilicusPM realize is: they can work with their clients. ZilicusPM enables them to invite client users free of cost and be confidently transparent to do business with them.
If project manager invite customers to projects in ZilicusPM, clients can know the project plan, the progress made at any given point in time, he can participate in discussion forum, add task comments, be part of project meeting, highlight issues/incidents and track those.
That said, your organization still exert controls/configuration in ZilicusPM that decides what project information should client users access.
