How To Truly Solve Your Business Pain Points With Best Practices

By Nick Evans, Senior Enablement Consultant

When clients decide to come to Kantata, they are looking to solve a pain point. Some common reasons are to improve (or introduce) their resource management process, unify their delivery processes, or improve their reporting. Fortunately for our clients, Kantata has solved these problems for many other clients before them. Our collective experience has allowed us to understand the best practices of the professional services industry.

The key to solving pain points is to follow industry best practices. In this blog, we will review how Kantata can guide you through the process of adopting  professional services industry best practices so that your business can reach a new level of success.

Understanding the Pain Point

When Kantata Professional Services begins engagements with our clients, we start with a business process review. This review begins with a knowledge transfer with our sales team so that we understand the pain points experienced by an organization and know what value the client is looking to get from Kantata. We then ask for documents and artifacts commonly used by the business so we can begin to understand the current processes. Once we are armed with this knowledge, we have our first meeting with the client to thoroughly understand the current state of their business. In this review, we also begin to think about the future state with Kantata, especially for processes related to pain points, to know what we’re working toward.

For example, let’s say the client is looking to improve their resource management process. When the Kantata team asks about their current state, the client explains that they begin to staff projects after their engagement statement of work (SOW) has been signed and they have a short period of time to find available resources. Someone from their operations team is responsible for finding available resources. They often struggle to staff the projects with the correct resources because of lack of availability. This leads to project kickoff delays or the use of third party contractors. Remembering the goal to improve resource management, the Kantata team will also ask if they are open to changing the process when implementing Kantata and if they have their own ideas about what the future staffing process will be. This helps identify the exact pain points and set the stage for the design conversations.

Designing the Solution

The Design and Build phase of implementation is when the client can learn about the differences between their current processes and best practices. As we configure the system together, we begin to make decisions on how the client team will use their new tool. When we come to a pain point, Kantata will explain the industry best practice. 

Continuing with our resource management example, the Kantata team will review the resource management feature and begin to ask critical design questions, such as:

• When will you begin staffing projects?
• Will you soft book resources?
• Who is responsible for staffing and reviewing capacity?

This is when we begin discussing best practices. To address the pain points in our example, the Kantata team would recommend to staff projects when the deal or opportunity has a high probability of closing instead of after, and we recommend using soft bookings to pencil in resources. This will give the client team time to find resources and make adjustments if necessary. The Kantata team would also suggest having clear ownership of staffing instead of relying on any member from the operations team to find resources. Having a dedicated resource manager will allow the client to plan ahead of time rather than react to immediate staffing needs.

Adopting Best Practices

After the Kantata client teams have worked to determine the solution, we must roll out the solution to the whole organization. Smaller process changes or ones that involve a smaller team can be easy to adopt, but larger process changes involving multiple teams can be challenging. The key to success is to create a change management plan). Smaller changes can be handled by internal communication and leadership guidance, but larger changes might involve audit reporting, follow up, and executive support to fully implement.

In our example, these resource management changes have a mix of small and large process changes. If the client agrees to use one or a few resource managers to own staffing, we need to ensure operations understands the new staffing process and that the new resource managers are properly trained. However, there are larger impacts to other teams. The delivery organization needs to be aware of the change in case there are staffing questions. The sales team might also require enablement if they do not consistently track deal or opportunity progress, since we are now relying on that information to begin our pipeline staffing. To ensure the new resource management process is successful, the client can create reporting to track when projects are being created, staffed, and kicked off. This will give the team data on where the change management issues are. The leadership team can then use this to coach individuals who are not following the new process.

Better Practices With Kantata

Business process changes are required to correct pain points, and they need full support from your organization. Kantata has the experience to identify the current process issues, recommend best practices, and implement the new solution. When our clients are open to change and work with us, we can achieve meaningful value and lasting change.