| At a glance The ability of your managers to make sound decisions quickly determines your ability to adapt and grow. Yet, many organizations overlook it. This article analyzes some critical decisions that managers in IT services companies make. It suggests how you can harness technology to improve the quality and the speed of making decisions. |
How quickly your organization grows, improves profitability, or transforms depends on how fast your managers can make decisions. Managerial decisions are complex in IT services companies because they undertake complex projects deploying 100s or 1000s of knowledge workers for their customers
If you are an IT professional, please pause and answer the above question. If you are in a leadership position, you should immediately assess your firm’s decision-making speed and quality. In this article, we shall discuss how professional services automation software, popularly known as PSA software, can facilitate collaboration and help speed up your decision-making.
Let’s consider some examples of crucial decisions you managers make regularly.
- Validating and approving project cost estimates for bidding
- Deciding on special pricing for a particular project bid
- Forecasting the requirement of resources with specific skill sets based on your deal pipeline
- Allocating optimal resource mix for a project
- Allocating or de-allocating resources depending on changed situations
- Raising an invoice that the customer won’t dispute
- Assessing if a project is within its cost budget
Let’s take a deep dive
Validating and estimating a project cost estimate
You need to assess whether the project’s work breakdown structure (WBS) is realistic and comparable to similar past projects. Next, you need to check if the cost of each resource matches with your organization’s current cost structure. You must check if the estimates of travel and associated costs are correct. You also need to ensure that indirect costs have been appropriately allocated. Gathering all this information or consulting with relevant departments takes time. Due to time pressure, managers might approve the cost estimates based on trust or after minimal verification.
Deciding on special pricing for a particular project bid
Assuming the project cost estimate is correct, the pricing decision depends on how the prospective customer’s operating practices might impact it. There are other factors, like the nature of competition, risk factors, and your available resource pool. All these require careful consideration and consultation. What kind of information and how much time would your senior manager need to approve such a project’s pricing?
Forecasting the requirement of resources with specific skill sets based on your deal pipeline
Recruiting new talent with the right skill sets and numbers takes time. Making sure that the right resources are available at the right is a critical success factor. How long does it take to gather information on the deal pipeline, resource requirements for each project, and expected availability of resources? How much time will a manager or a group of managers need to gather all this information and finalize a talent acquisition plan?
What is the productivity of your managers?
All the above decisions are crucial for your success. The few examples described above should convince you that such choices are complex. You need your managers to be productive. When you try Googling about managers’ productivity, you’ll find that most search results focus on raising employees’ productivity. They talk about increasing the productivity of programmers, web designers, and other workers, but there are very few resources on managerial productivity. Managers are not paid by the hour. Most of their performance metrics are linked to the organization’s performance which are known only after the financial year is over. It’s easier to monitor and measure the productivity of a programmer, such as the lines of code written or the number of products produced in a day. So, naturally, the focus usually is on what is easy to measure – the paid-by-hour work.
What is not easy to measure is more important
Ability of the managers to make sound and timely decisions like above determines how quickly your organization can adapt and grow. For the managers, plenty of advice is available on time management, to-do lists, and priority setting. Though helpful, these techniques don’t go far enough in raising their productivity.
What is meant by the productivity of managers?
The answer is simple: quality and speed of decision-making.
How do managers make higher-quality decisions?
Managers gather information by collating different kinds of data ( e.g., resource skill sets, costs, and utilization). Next, they collaborate with other managers to arrive at high-quality decisions.
How do you help your managers to make decisions quickly?
You make real-time data available to whomever needs to make decisions. Studies have shown that knowledge workers and managers spend a disproportionate of their time gathering data and reconciling it with others. Therefore you automate data gathering and compilation to speed up decision-making and enable collaboration.
How does PSA professional services automation software help in decision making?
You have all the information and data necessary to make decisions within your organization. The problem is that it is not easily accessible to managers. Data is scattered across different departments and in CRM, HRMS, project management modules, payroll systems, and spreadsheets. Gathering this information requires a considerable amount of manual work before any decision can be made.
PSA software integrates all your existing packages and data generated from various sources. It takes data at the point of generation and makes it available at the point of its use in the right combination. The PSA software has built-in workflows for data validation and combining data into meaningful information required for decision-making.
Which PSA software should you deploy?
There are several professional services automation software in the market. But not all of them digitize opportunity-to-cash workflows. Not all of them provide a ‘single version of the truth’ in real time. Kytes PSA software does it all through its modules.
Therefore, to speed up your crucial decisions like those mentioned above, you need Kytes PSA software.
Don’t delay your decision-making. Contact us at [email protected] for a demo and more information.
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