By: Con Zymaris
Email: <conz@cybersource.com.au>
Modern businesses are quickly recognizing the need to make intelligent use of information throughout the organization to better address support issues and other business problems. An open source professional services automation solution can help track and manage customer requests, problems, complaints, tasks and any other projects that need to be tracked, along with the billing and expenses related to those activities. Web-based action tracking offers the best and most simple way to gain control over information, issues and tasks for a group or department, or throughout an organization worldwide.
With the increasing business requirement that information management systems provide substantial and immediate return on investment, an open source professional services solution is the answer to many of your service-industry information management concerns.
Do you run a services-based business? One that sells people's time and effort? Examples include IT services, marketing and management consultancies, legal and financial services work. If so, then you would normally need some way to track that work, track who is supposed to be doing that work, track the clients that you're doing work for, the documentation which changes hands between you and the clients and finally track the billing for your time and effort.
There are a number of ways to do this. Many accounting packages provide a time billing facility. There are project management systems which allow you to track projects and sometimes timesheets. However, to truly manage a professional services business and most of its idiosyncratic facets, you really need what is called a Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution.
PSA solutions are readily available – search the web and you'll find dozens of examples. What I would propose however is that due to the nature of professional services business, and more specifically your professional services business, you really need to be using an open source professional services automation solution. Why is this? Well, your services business more than likely doesn't operate like any other services business. Your workflow, your management oversight, your procedures and policies likely match no other firm's.
Because of this, you really need a totally flexible PSA solution. One that provides most of what you need at its core but that can either be tweaked (if only light changes are needed) or surgically re-arranged (if more radical changes are called for). And the only way to provide such a degree of flexibility to match your business's specific needs is with an open source solution.
My colleagues and I have run a professional services business for over 15 years. After trying to run that business using traditional tools for the first half of our existence, we decide to bite the bullet and build a solution which would better help by providing a comprehensive multilevel, multi-project planning, scheduling and reporting engine scalable to thousands of projects. A tool that allows us to search for qualified and available resources, assign tasks and manage staff with a powerful resource search engine across single or multiple projects. Such a tool also needs to offer cost-control management and project graphical and milestone-enabled Gantt-style bar-chart reporting capabilities. In all, a tool which gives us a valuable platform for managing the priorities and objectives that drive our business.
The tool we built is called allocPSA and it's something we made available as open source software so that all services businesses can obtain and use for free.
allocPSA is an on-line (i.e. web-based) Professional Services Automation system. allocPSA provides a suite of integrated applications designed for organisations which provide services to clients. It enables services personnel to become more productive and profitable by increasing their efficiency through increased utilisation and productive time, improved planning and integrated knowledge management. It reduces the likelihood of slip-ups and increases the traceability and manageability of projects, expenses, tasks and people.
allocPSA can streamline the process of allocating staff resources to key projects, managing strategic initiatives at a granular level, and can offer a platform for process collaboration and knowledge reuse to any professional services business.
allocPSA consists of numerous software modules for business areas such as: resource planning, project management, time and expenses, fault & issues tracking, message, announcement, reminder and knowledge management, collaboration, services supply chain, human resources and staff skilling and certification, item loans and management of cost-centres. allocPSA offers integration between the modules, as well as an open architecture and integration with existing external invoicing, bookkeeping and payroll systems.
allocPSA is intended for use in support of daily organisational operations, such as client contact, project management, task and resource allocation, skills tracking, time-sheeting, issues tracking, calendaring, reminders and escalation, item loans, cost expenses and centres as well as integration with existing external accounts and billing systems.
By deploying an allocPSA, all your staff can access the application from any networked computer which has a web browser. Depending on your network configuration and security policies, staff can also access the allocPSA system from external computers. Therefore, they can monitor tasks and submit timesheets from home, or from any Internet-access point around the world.
As a web-based application, users access allocPSA via the standard web-browser they already have on their PCs. No software needs to be installed on their PCs. Installation and maintenance of allocPSA is therefore a simple and straightforward affair.
As mentioned, few professional services firms work the same way. Because of this, allocPSA has been designed to offer your firm the ultimate in flexible deployment integration and ongoing control. To that end, the complete source code for allocPSA is supplied under a GPL open source licence. You are thus able to extend, modify or maintain this code, should you so wish, or hire 3rd parties to undertake this work for you. This greatly reduces your business risks in adopting allocPSA as a system element in your core business operations. The product's source code will always be yours in perpetual code escrow.
Oh, and did I mention that open source software is free? If you were to pull out your cheque book to buy a proprietary professional services automation system, expect to pay $10-15K just for the base operating platform and database, $30-50K for the PSA solution, plus implementation costs and 20% or more on annual maintenance, just to gain access to ongoing software updates. Not to mention that in order to run such a system you would need to buy new server hardware just to support the 'weight' of the operating platform and database - say another $5K. That's a $100K cost over three years. Imagine what kind of return you'd need to get that investment back.
By comparison, allocPSA which is itself built totally upon open source software (an open source operating platform and database and an open source application server) can easily support 30 or more of your staff off that old Pentium III 800 MHz that you have sitting in the corner. You can download and install it and all its dependent software components for no outlay cost.
Using proven project management disciplines and processes, allocPSA helps you optimize resources and manage activities to meet project deadlines and budgets.
allocPSA automatically generates customizable outgoing email alerts to instantly notify relevant assignees, managers and other people involved with all aspects of service delivery. It can also alert your designated customer contacts of your progress on tasks. Daily email alerts, sent to all resources, outlines that day's key tasks and scheduled events, meetings and expectations.
A task and reminder Calendar is available for all staff on entry into allocPSA, via the Home page digital dashboard. Reminders can be established at the Task, Project or General level.
A filtering drill-down facility to resource (personnel) availability and skilling makes it possible to determine which of your staff is suited for particular project and tasks.
allocPSA provides a simple inventory and loans management module, a framework for producing project cost-estimators, a graphical chart representation of historical and current business activity, as well as an open-ended and customisable report generator which allows you to extract data to a web-page or CSV file, ready for mail-merges or exporting.
allocPSA has dozens of screens, but here are a few which might give you a reasonable glimpse of what the solution looks like.
One-stop overview of user's daily/weekly calendar, company announcements, reminders, tasks, projects, cost-centre balances, submitted or timesheets pending approval.
Contract, consultancy, implementation or other templates of projects.
Customer contacts, information, budgets, timesheet authoriser.
Document and file attachments.
Project-wide reminders.
Project-wide notes and modification history.
Resource, internal and external rates.
One or more project leaders who can review project status.
Project activity graphs, showing overdue tasks.
Timesheet history and comparison to budget estimates.
Implements tasks, subtasks, project phases, faults and messages.
Unlimited number of tasks per project.
Unlimited number of comments per task.
Unlimited number of reminders/escalations per task
Escalation regime for priority tasks not completed within time limits.
Very flexible timesheet workflow engine.
Allocation of timesheets on a per-project, per staff basis.
Routes timesheets (and sends notification email) to specific project's managers for approval.
Subsequently routes of timesheets (along with notification email) to financial administrators for invoicing/payroll.
Staff, project and general cost-centres, including transfer and tracking of funds between cost-centre accounts.
Importing and exporting of invoices/billing.
Allocation of invoice payments to staff, project and general cost-centres.
Searching of invoices related to projects.
Expense forms and claims for staff and projects.
Supports repeat/cyclical expenses in cost-centres
Reconciliation report.
Integration with external payroll and accounting systems
Full customer company details
Unlimited contacts per company
Allocation of primary contact status
Unlimited notes per company
Unlimited document attachments
Overview of projects undertaken for this company
Actual and potential project revenue from this company
Open-ended item loan, borrowing lists and overdue status
Unlimited number of staff resources/personnel.
Information detail on availability.
Flexible and powerful skills tracking engine, adaptable to any industry.
Overview of resource allocation, tasks, overdue tasks etc.
Week, fortnight and month overview of tasks, appointments and reminders.
Project and task-level reminders.
Cyclical repeat reminders
Completely open-ended report engine.
Every field in the core component tables can be queried, filtered and exported.
Integrated with the Projects and Task engine and therefore the timesheet system.
Escalation engine sends email to specified staff on inactivity/overdue status.
Project-level document attachments.
Customer-level document attachments.
Theory and discussion are all well and good, but in business, practice and execution are better. You can take the step of implementing an open source professional services automation solution by downloading the allocPSA application and reading through the documentation on the official website: http://www.allocpsa.org/
In the next installment, we'll look at creating a new project, adding resources, billing rates, tasks and reminders.