Tips to Choose Technology with Agility in Mind

Does your firm’s operational tech, intended to “streamline processes,” ever seem to hold you back?

Have you found yourself delayed in a project because of tech issues?

Does client servicing or staff allocation fall behind because of involved processes?

With endless choices on the market, professional services firms are hard-pressed to manage their priorities while shopping for tech…let alone their final choices.

While we won’t claim to capture the extent of your priorities, most firms are interested in maintaining ultimate responsiveness to their clients. The level of agility leaders desire often sits at odds with tech stack maintenance or limitations.

If we were shopping for software for a client-facing organization to avoid this issue, the following is what we’d consider.

Time Tracking Software with Native Insights

Let us paint a picture for you: a firm adopts time tracking with high hopes for increased utilization rates, less overservicing, and better future capacity planning.

The firm wasn’t quite sure about its investment or how it would go over with the staff, so the purchasing team chose an inexpensive platform dedicated to time tracking. It claims to offer fifty or more reports to aggregate time data, but managers quickly discover that the reports are tedious to prepare and cross-analysis between time and budgets is nonexistent.

The data collected in this time tracking system is useless to the firm until it finds a way to integrate with its financial reporting system…which, by the way, may be just as slow.

We recommend a platform with reporting of its own – reporting robust enough for:

• Managers to check dashboards to track according to plan
• Directors to plan staff capacity months in advance
• Leaders to predict future profitability using reliable historical data without having to request data from the finance or operations team.

It’s important that this data be accessible day-to-day for quick decision making and embedded in excellent reports for periodic strategizing.

Project Management Configuration Can be a Rabbit Hole

It’s no surprise that out of all the technology functions within professional services (time tracking, CRM, accounting, human capital management, etc), the widest variety of vendor choices exists in project management. There’s a simple reason: no one size fits all.

Project management methods may be as unique as an organization itself.

The benefit: you aren’t forced to settle.
The detriment: you may always believe you’re settling.

With endless options and endless configurability, cementing the project management system of your dreams may seem within reach. However, this endeavor quickly becomes a drain on valuable time.

Here at ClickTime, we’ve spoken to enterprising customers who aimed at building their own project management app but found themselves hopelessly frustrated and knee-deep in working out kinks they shouldn’t have been facing at all. We recommend testing two or three of the highly configurable project management software packages on the market, choosing your favorite or the one that integrates best with the rest of your tech stack, and moving on.

Don’t Forget Expenses

How many expenses does your team submit each month? How much time does it take to process data and account for it according to the related client project?

If these questions are making you feel uncomfortable, it’s probably time to audit your current expense management system. There are hundreds of different expense management software that can save your organization time and money, and reduce confusion around who can expense and approve various gifts, drinks, meals, mileage, etc. While most firms have something in place, this is a strategic time-saving area we recommend optimizing.

Consider the Downsides of an All-In-One Solution

An all-in-one seems like the ultimate agile solution. Not so fast.

• Limited functionality: All-in-one firm technology promises to save buyers the effort of shopping, integrating, and configuring. However, no one can do everything well. The hidden cost of convenience is functionality, which ultimately slows you down and limits your agility.
• May constrict operations: The key to running a successful organization is not to let it run you. The same applies to the technology you choose as a tool to help you along the way. Most all-in-one solutions are effective because they rely on a certain way of working. If your firm needs to expand beyond those methods, you’ll find yourself fighting with your own technology to do something that was supposed to be “streamlined.”
• Unnecessary cost: Agility in client servicing requires financial bandwidth, and a bloated firm will naturally face challenges here. Beware the trap of extra features, particularly if you would buy a separate system for that purpose anyway.

  Maybe you really like your current project management system. Don’t pay extra for software that promises to combine project management, a CRM, billing, and service delivery, for example.

  Pay for what you need and nothing else by shopping wisely for a few great platforms.

Suite vendors ultimately offer you one thing: convenience in purchasing multiple solutions at once. A suite will never deliver the superior technology solution and will not commit to R&D for updating every module in the suite that matters to you. If one-stop-shopping is your top criteria in selecting a technology, you trap yourself in a limited solution that rarely improves over time, and find yourself searching for a more suitable solution in the near future.

At ClickTime, customers approach us frequently after having tested an all-in-one solution, frustrated by its rigidity. They’ve dumped hours into maintaining the system. Tailor-made, purpose-built technology is usually a breath of fresh air for these firms.

Prioritize Great Integrations

Given the above, our perspective is that great integrations between individual software platforms that specialize in doing their own job is the ideal. (Sure, resource reporting native to time tracking is great, but do you really want to sacrifice functionality to include a CRM in that same system?) Ultimate responsiveness requires great tools, not bloated tools.

Custom configurations, API access, or exclusive integrations can be a pain up front, but the time and cost are worth it for organizations with an eye toward agility.

Great integrations are the first step to an operational symphony.

Enhancing Delivery with Technology

Ultimately, any client-facing business’ priority is service delivery, not technology configuration. But up-front consideration can build the foundation to improve delivery itself. When you make decisions with an eye toward agility, you’re creating a well-oiled machine. When operations, finance, and project management cooperate in harmony, your team is freed up to focus on the most important thing: your clients!