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As consulting firms grow, it’s easy for project team members to feel burned out. With multiple projects going on at the same time and projects comprising different team members, communications can bog down. Documenting progress, finding information, and confirming task status all take up too much time.
As a result, the various team members—from marketing to sales to project management, individual resources, and accounting—can’t focus on helping clients and the core skills they enjoy applying. Instead, they get buried in emails, texts, voice mails, and instant chat messages. It’s hard to be productive when people keep “screaming” for updates.
When this happens, productivity suffers, and the quality of the deliverables decreases. The project may go over budget, beyond the deadline, or even end in a complete failure. The next thing you know, the client takes their business elsewhere, and if this culture persists, employees will leave too.
Below is a graphic listing indicators, which if present, point to underlying issues in the operations of the firm. Operational efficiency is key to the health and growth of a Professional Services firm. The underlying process which connects the project life cycle is referred to as the Quote-to-Cash process. This process exists in all firms, however, many have disconnected systems and subprocesses which impact business performance, employee morale and client satisfaction.
The key to avoiding project failures and client churn is to establish an integrated Quote-to-Cash (QtC) process, which is critical as professional service firms grow rapidly and add resources. As project lifecycles advance from marketing and sales to project management, delivery and invoicing, the handoff at each phase is an opportunity to fail the client or exceed their expectations.
To implement an integrated Quote-to-Cash process, it’s vital to recognize the pitfalls that can lead to project team burnout. It starts with Sales. Are clear expectations being set on what the firm does and the value proposition?
With a clear overall purpose and value proposition for the firm, each role in the project lifecycle can better understand and execute their mission. The marketing team knows the target market and how to communicate the messaging to prospects. The sales team knows how to identify which opportunities to focus on and how to deliver the sales pitch.
Just as importantly, sales can identify bad deals, so they don’t waste time chasing them. The clear purpose and value proposition help them manage and prioritize the pipeline so that if it’s full, they don’t automatically turn down new opportunities. And if the pipeline is thin, they don’t automatically respond to every RFP.
Developing a clear purpose and value proposition also leads to an important benefit. As clients engage, they understand why your firm is talking to them. They gain a clear expectation of what you promise to deliver.
Equally important, is the integration of your customer relationship (CRM) system with your Project Management and Delivery systems. This ensures the smooth flow of sales information to the delivery team. Avoids manually and duplicate entry and mitigates the risk of missed or misinterpreted information.
After the sales team has correctly qualified a client, the project manager—with that same clear view of the expectations—can come up with accurate estimates for the project. These include the resource requirements for the consulting firm and the client team, getting buy-in and support from the client’s key stakeholders, and setting the budget and the timeline. The project manager also ensures the scope is acceptable to the client.
Here’s where another pitfall commonly occurs. You may discover the client wants to partner with you and has the budget for your consulting services. But the product they want you to implement is too expensive, or they won’t generate the ROI they expect from the project.
These pitfalls can be avoided by asking about the budget for the all-in costs and the expected ROI early in the project. When you realize the client doesn’t have the budget or you can’t deliver the ROI, it’s time to move on to another opportunity.
As projects get underway, another pitfall that can emerge is not realizing when an issue arises. Perhaps the client asks the resource team to expand the scope. Or the resource team needs more time to complete the project. Either one can impact the budget and your margins.
When these issues occur, the project manager needs to know right away—while there’s time to enact proper change management. They can then determine, along with the client, if an adjustment to the budget is required. By taking a proactive approach, the project is more likely to get back on track.
From a project resource perspective, using modern AI-driven tools to enter status updates, time, expenses, and issues makes it possible to provide project managers and the accounting team with real-time feedback. This data can also feed automatically into reports to compare quoted budgets to actual budgets.
AI also helps from a burnout perspective. With tools that help people enter their updates, they can focus more time on their core skills while the firm reduces the overhead costs of admin work.
On the financial side, if there’s a potential impact on margins, real-time tools can identify non-billable time as well as issues that cause extra charges for a client that was not on the original quote. This is key because not knowing what has gone wrong until it’s too late is another pitfall. A change order that generates a new invoice can lead to upset clients and churn if they decide to go to a competitor.
To establish an integrated quote-to-cash process, many professional service firms turn to a Project Business Automation (PBA) system like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations. This technology integrates data across project lifecycles from marketing to sales, project management, resources, and accounting.
PBA consolidates these critical business functions into a unified platform. This eliminates data silos, enhances transparency, and equips consulting firms with a comprehensive view of their operations. Microsoft applications also go beyond traditional ERP functionality by integrating advanced analytics, AI-driven insights, and cloud-based scalability.
With Project Operations, you can unify disparate workflows and enable seamless communication to ensure all project team members have real-time access to reliable data. By combining Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP with other Microsoft solutions, such as Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, and Azure, you can transform your communication and decision-making processes.
To learn more about how a PBA solution can help your professional services firm, check out this Velosio e-book, Boosting Profitability and Growth with Data-Driven Insights. And for help in leveraging Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions to prevent employee burnout, contact Velosio today. We will be glad to assist.
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