Key Questions Professional Services Firms Should Ask to Gain Insights | Velosio

Questions asked during online meetings and around the office are revealing and insightful—into the health of the firm and adequacy of systems used to manage operations.

A typical professional services firm structures its business processes around the personas involved e.g. Project Managers have defined a role with responsibilities as will other roles such as Resource Managers, Consultants, Project Administrators etc.
A Project Manager will be focused on project management activities such as project planning, project staffing, and meeting deadlines. A PM will be looking for answers to questions such as:

Is the project under budget?
What is the project margin? Is it profitable?
Do I have the right resources assigned to the project?

Are these questions easily answered by the tools and applications used or is it a manual effort to compile the data?

The management team requires a more holistic view of the operations and will ask questions that cover multiple facets of the business:

Do we complete our projects on time?
What are our margins?
How does each project compare in terms of profitability?
How much billable time do our consultants log?
Do we meet client expectations?
Are we suffering from revenue leakage—failing to bill for billable time?
What’s in the sales pipeline?
Which industry sectors respond most to our marketing campaigns?
What do we project for cash flow in the next month?

Hungry for information, managers and internal teams want better insights into forecasts and performance measurements. Questions like these tell you where your firm suffers from data blind spots. The questions also serve as a framework around which you can build a business intelligence system so you can provide the insights everyone needs.

Fast Growth Puts Business Intelligence on the Back Burner

The need for insights is obvious. However, professional services firms do not always have systems in place to get at and visualize all the data they collect.

Fast growth is a typical reason, especially through acquisitions. As firms grow, they naturally focus on hiring resources and delivering on customer expectations.

That means back-office systems, like business intelligence, tend to go on the back burner. Acquisitions also bring on the challenge of introducing different business processes that people and business intelligence solutions don’t necessarily align with.

The Culprits: Structure, Processes and Isolated Data

The primary culprits in gaining visibility into how well the project lifecycle works and how the company performs are the absence of structure in the organization, the lack of tools to support business processes, and isolated silos of information.

The lack of business processes or processes that don’t work well is usually the underlying cause of the lack of visibility into data. The software for managing resources, projects, and operations is meant to enable these processes to run efficiently. But the success of these tools is predicated on well-defined business processes that align with desired business outcomes.

Every process should have relevance, a purpose, and achieve specific business goals that consolidate into strategic goals.

The Keys for Processes to Run Efficiently

Professional services firms have business processes that run across the entire organization. The lifecycle of a client engagement, for example, goes through marketing (lead generation), sales (managing opportunities), technical architects (solution proposals and design), the delivery team, resource management, and project management.

For the lifecycle to run efficiently, you need well-defined processes with personas that delineate the responsibilities of each role—such as what does business development do in comparison to account executives? What do practice and portfolio managers do in comparison to project managers and resource managers?

Then there are the roles of consultants, line-of-business managers, the finance team, and the operational team that manages overall project delivery. Next, accounting turns work into invoices and cash. Then the senior management team analyzes every project to determine how the business performs.

Throughout the entire process, you have underlying aspects of project governance as well as managing risk and collaboration. The business outcomes are all driven through business processes, which in turn rely on a well-structured organization.

Templated Services Reduce Project Variability

Organizations without a solid structure and strategic initiatives tend to have greater variability in their projects. Therein lies the source of inefficiencies; if every project has a degree of variability, it makes the performance and execution of that project harder. Conversely, a firm with standardized processes for scoping, deploying, and managing projects realizes significant efficiencies.

The key is to reduce variability by providing templated services. From project to project, each of your projects likely includes deliverables that are 80% similar. A templated service can bring in that 80% and give your delivery teams the flexibility to adjust the remaining 20%. If you get there, you gain a lot of efficiencies and save time for your consultants as you experience repeatability from one project to the next.

Essential Guide for the Modern Professional Services Firm

Templating your services for specific industries also plays into increasing your referrals. You are more appealing to prospective clients evaluating your firm because you have consistent ways of pricing projects and delivering services. This is also key for increasing your margins.

Artificial Intelligence Smooths Data Flow Transitions

Data analytics is predicated on the smooth transition of data flows and harmonizing different data formats. The modern terminology for this is a data warehouse that allows you to look at data in many different slices across multiple data sources and in an intuitive manner.

Once you reduce the variability of your business processes, it’s easier to build a working data warehouse. And by adding artificial intelligence, such as Microsoft Copilot, the system can take over some of the human effort by performing analytic functions and providing actionable data.

Dynamics 365 Business Intelligence in Action

One of the key processes data warehouses powered by AI streamlines is quote-to-cash—from selling to planning, scheduling, delivery, and accounting. The process serves as a key benchmark for evaluating the performance of professional services firms. You can measure your organizational maturity by the degree to which you have automated this process.

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions and tools, you can tailor your quote-to-cash process to align with your business model—so all the parts work well together, and you realize the efficiencies of the process.

The Copilot AI components deployed across Dynamics 365 solutions serve as agents to which users can delegate work. This makes it possible to harness the power of AI alongside users to produce efficiency gains and make them more productive. AI automates time-consuming, monotonous tasks to deliver insights to users faster so they can make decisions sooner. Users work more efficiently because their time is free to do tasks suited for humans.

For example, on the finance side, AI can analyze structured and unstructured data to help understand how quickly a customer pays their bills. This includes analyzing payment history (structured data) and client sentiment (unstructured data) on the latest project. AI can pull all this together and derive conclusions. Happy customers tend to pay quicker.

In resource management, AI can prompt project managers on which consultants are available for a project and who’s best suited for each project. Managers can see how much time each consultant has written off on past projects, how much revenue they have generated, and if they have worked on similar projects.

Another example of automating routine tasks is the project status report. AI can pull the data from different sources and then correlate and interpret the data. By taking this off the plate of project managers, they can focus on managing resources and interacting with clients.

Feeding the Data Monster

As you build a business intelligence data warehouse, consider that AI is a data monster. You have to keep feeding the monster and determine if you collect data efficiently as a byproduct of good business processes or put too much effort into capturing the data.

If you populate your databases through AI tools and the use of default entries, with the tools that analyze and integrate the data, you can reduce the hungry data monster and capture large volumes of data.

That’s because today’s Dynamics 365 technology allows you to collect data, not just by simply entering the data, but also through a variety of sources. AI can pre-fill form fields and learn from human inputs.

Here’s how it works: Perhaps the first time you use a form, AI will leave empty fields. But after you fill the form in, AI analyzes the content to pre-fill the form the next time and may get five wrong. You make the corrections, and the AI learns—the error rate decreases over time and ultimately gets close to 90% accuracy.

Data Visibility Solutions to Produce Desired Business Outcomes

Velosio implements data visibility solutions to produce desired business outcomes—ranging from enhancing sales processes to optimizing resource management, higher client satisfaction, and increased profitability. To go from blind spots to clarity and gain the insights your professional services firm needs, contact Velosio today.

Paying Attention to Questions Paves the Way for Professional Services Firms to Gain Key Insights