When CRM Met PPM

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Complexity   CRM   Estimating   Portfolio Management   Stakeholder Management  

In the professional services world, there is a category of products called PSA: professional services automation. These are tools designed specifically for service organizations (consultants, lawyers, etc.) that offer solutions that can seamlessly integrate all elements of the customer lifecycle.

As such, they have customer relationship management (CRM) functionality to manage leads, sales cycles, estimating and quotes. They also have project management functionality to manage the work and support collaboration, and this may extend to project portfolio management (or PPM) for management across projects—resource utilization and distribution, for example. The work-tracking elements of the project solution then integrate with billing and financial tracking functionality to not only initiate and manage customer invoices, but also to support project profitability and margin analysis.

These tools have become increasingly popular in recent years as the functionality has improved and the ability to integrate with other enterprise applications has become simpler. However, PSA solutions are still not the norm in many services organizations, and that’s often because of a perceived difficulty in implementing such a highly integrated solution—it has the potential to impact every element of the business. That of course is the point, but it’s also one of the …

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