4 Ways Project Managers Can Use Technology To Take Their Work to the Next Level

This is an excerpt from Kantata’s ebook “Level Up Your Project Management Career: Top 4 Growth Opportunities for the Future.” To learn about critical areas of growth for project managers, check out the full eBook here.

Technology is going to be an invaluable asset in your career, but not all technology is well-suited to the unique needs of professional services organizations. Put bluntly, not all project management solutions are created equal. As a project manager developing a career in the professional services industry, it is important for you to build competencies and skills surrounding software that is purpose-built to address the project management needs of businesses in the professional services industry, which need to manage revenue-generating, client-facing projects. 

Vertical software solutions like professional services automation (PSA) tools and professional services industry clouds support services organizations by surfacing risks that might negatively impact project profitability, client satisfaction, or resource utilization. These tools help teams streamline time-consuming tasks through purpose-built automation and workflows that make project management more efficient and accurate while freeing up time that can instead be spent on billable activities or on more strategic work.

Here are four ways that project managers can move past the ways they traditionally use technology and reach the next level in understanding and improving their management processes. 

1. Collaborate in Context 

The shift to more remote work and the massive size of many companies means that project managers need to find ways to bring disparate teams closer together so that work can be delivered in a highly collaborative, efficient, and disciplined manner. Technology that is purpose-built for the professional services vertical brings together the best aspects of collaborative work management, resource management, project management, and financial management solutions, reinforcing the connections between teams and processes with in-built industry best practice. This enables better cross-team, cross-project, and cross-departmental communication. . 

Collaboration doesn’t just mean connecting full-time in-house employees. Modern collaboration facilitates work across businesses and countries, bringing remote employees, subcontractors, and clients into the loop with ease. Providing team members with intuitive user experiences that can be customized to their unique roles and daily demands can entice people across your workforce to adopt best practice approaches and purpose-built tools instead of sticking to the old ways of doing work. With communication channels and project management systems brought together in one comprehensive solution, team members can collaborate in context with data insights and tasks at their fingertips to support one another. 

2. Encourage More Robust, Financially-Minded Project Management Practices

Standard project management software tends to provide a basic level of built-in automation and financial control — they can help to reduce time spent on tasks and catch some mistakes that lead to revenue leakage before they happen, but they fail to serve as a reliable source of truth for project data. Because of this, project managers in the professional services industry often find themselves still turning to spreadsheets and third-party project management applications to manage their projects, tasks, teams, and more. 

Successful project managers push beyond the limitations of standard project management software. They leverage technology purpose-built to handle professional services projects, consolidating all project information into one trusted source of truth. Because project management, resource management, project accounting, and business intelligence are all intertwined within one holistic solution, managers have real-time, comprehensive visibility of every project’s status and performance against plan. In addition, by tightly coupling project accounting with every element of projects, these solutions help managers keep track of financial progress against budget and margin targets down to the task level.

3. Optimize Resource Management

Traditional project management solutions support users in the completion of everyday, individual tasks. While this is helpful, a modern, purpose-built solution brings key project information (such as tasks) together with essential resource data (such as utilization metrics), building a holistic picture of supply (people) and demand (projects) that is hard to see in many solutions that aren’t built for the professional services vertical. With the right software, project managers have the clarity they need to make adjustments in staffing that maximize utilization, strengthen planning, and achieve delivery success throughout the entire project lifecycle. 

From capacity planning and estimating to project planning and execution, a unified platform addresses the most pressing needs of managers at every stage. Basic project management software can often support project planning, but lacks effective support for demand and capacity planning, as well as the ability to provide the visibility and collaboration necessary to address unplanned changes in resource needs at the speed the business requires. 

4. Built-In Business Intelligence

Managing projects with precision and agility starts with having all important operational information in one location. Achieving this depends on leveraging an operational platform that comprehensively collects all relevant data points throughout the planning and delivery lifecycle, and displays up-to-date views of the information required to make data-driven business decisions. 

Collecting these critical data elements in a single source of truth and consolidating teams on a single professional services solution means that there is no waiting for timesheet updates and data from other systems. Unlike standard project management tools which often provide limited reporting toolkits or only have an integration option with a third-party Business Intelligence (BI) solution, professional services solutions provide robust BI with purpose-built, out-of-the-box reports and dashboards that provide fast, critical insights to users. This data can support hiring decisions, forecast revenue, drive desired profit margins, track project health, optimize business processes, and more. Built-in BI capabilities provide newfound visibility and control over business processes and save massive amounts of time previously spent crunching numbers.

Start Seeing The Signs And Take Action

Technology is constantly advancing, so why shouldn’t your skills as a project manager advance, too? Learn more about how to strengthen your career in Kantata’s eBook “Level Up Your Project Management Career: Top 4 Growth Opportunities for the Future.”