Supporting a Growing Professional Services Firm
Hi all and happy New Year!
I read a good article today about things fast-growing professional services firms need to keep in mind as the expand. The bottom line is that it is easy to move beyond paper, pencil and Excel into a world of processes and procedures that aren’t scalable and that will eventually hinder a firm’s growth. The author’s did a great job listing the various functions that bog down earliest:
- resource utilization
- invoicing
- project estimation and delivery
- maintaining a resource database
- sales and marketing
- reporting and analytics
They go on to make some high level recommendations like to look at Software as a Service (SaaS, also referred to as cloud) offerings but don’t settle for point solutions that aren’t easily integrated. Their final recommendation is to look at an integrated enterprise solution. Here is where I part ways with the authors a bit. My advice is to:
- look at all of these areas holistically and put together a technology plan that allows for growth in all these areas.
- look at point solutions that “play nice” with other solutions and have easy integration. Compare that to the risks and benefits of an enterprise solution.
Depending on the service area most firms have a variety of choices, from specialized applications for certain sorts of firms to broad based applications that are easily customizable for a variety of needs. Bottom line, get help from someone knowledgeable about what is available and make a plan. You’ll be glad you thought it through.