As I'm sure that we all know, there are countless numbers of IT consulting organizations. I have worked for/with many of them and I can tell you that the bulk of them are missing a vital component that is holding them back from reaching true success. Below, I will cover the 6 things that these organizations need, but typically do terribly. A PSA tool, or professional services automation tool, will massively increase your IT organization's productivity and profitability. By employing one of these tools, the leadership of these organizations could be significantly more effective.

1. Project Management is typically a huge challenge for IT consulting organizations. This is here for various reasons but a big one is that they use junk project management tools or really good tools that have a junk integration (or no integration) into their other tools. What I've seen is that they cobble together multiple half-effective solutions to make one process. These tools allow for a central project management tool that is 100% integrated into the rest of the business process such as sales, customer service, billing, and expenses. When a project is built, tasks are built and assigned, and tracked as part of a holistic business process.

2. Automated Client Updates are a key feature that so many consulting organizations overlook. Most organizations put a process into setting up manual processes and training project managers or worse, their technical resources, to provide daily updates to their clients. This takes (wastes) time by taking away from being able to actually do the work. Since most IT consulting organizations have not been able to escape the hours-based costing model, they are still trading hours for pay and this costs them pay which then costs them profitability. By leveraging the tools properly, your organization can keep a client incredibly informed on not only a daily basis, but most likely a task-by-task basis, and not have any additional effort beyond the normal work process.

3. Automated Status Reports are another key features that most IT consulting orgs overlook. How much time is spent on your internal people and processes to create a weekly status report to a client. Why wouldn't you spend that effort automate the report ONCE and have it go out every week, on a schedule, to the client in a consistent format. I often see different project managers using different formats and this can cause significant confusion or doubt within the mind of a client. By properly leveraging automated reporting within a professional services tool such as Connectwise, your client can receive a consistent and informative report automatically at the end of the week automatically. It doesn't matter if the PM takes a day off, "forgets" to do it, or has other things going on. It goes and the client is happy.

4. Resource Availability and Reporting is a common difficulty in consulting companies. Who is available? When are they available? How long until we have an available resource? Or god forbid, they do those weekly calls where consultants are required to estimate their hours for this week and next week which is always a SWAG and is most often not even close. Instead, the proper tools allow consultants to schedule out their time based on the expected time for each task, enter it on a calendar, and have that tie back to the client and project. By the way, this also negates the need for a timesheet process because time is entered as tasks are worked on. In an instant, you can see the availability across all resources, departments and work streams.

5. Workflow Alerting is a commonly overlooked aspect of consulting. Constantly, I see people dumbfounded that a project went over budget and they didn't know. Or a task was assigned to them a month ago and no one told them. Or project available time went into the negative and the PM wasn't aware. Your organization shouldn't have to rely, in today's world, on people going to look at something. Leverage the available tools to set up automated workflows and alerts to notify a PM when a task is overdue, or to notify a sales person when a contract is up for renewal, or notify a consultant when a task is assigned to them, or notify the account executive and the PM and the consultant and the practice lead when a project goes from green to red. These are easy ways to increase productivity and visibility, as well as accountability.

6. Client Portals are often an ignored item in consulting. With most PSA tools, client portals are included. The client can have one place to go see invoices, profile contact info, open service tickets, open project tickets, executive management reports, and to open new requests. Additionally, they can often times even pay their bill from here.

While this has focused primarily on project consulting, this heavily applies to service providers too. Even more so actually with the automation and system support functions.