Unlocking the Full Potential of Your Team: Overcoming Skill-Centric Challenges with the Right Technology
In the fast-evolving professional services landscape, the difference between a high-performing organization and a stagnant one often comes down to how effectively a company leverages its team’s skills. The right technology doesn’t just offer new insights—it can be the key to unlocking the potential that exists within your team, thereby enhancing service delivery across project portfolios and driving significant growth. Yet, realizing this potential remains a considerable challenge for many organizations.
Recent research conducted by Kantata and S&P Global Market Intelligence, titled “The Macro Technology Shift Impacting the Professional Services Industry,” sheds light on the critical hurdles companies face in leveraging skills through their current technological frameworks.
Let’s explore the top skill-centric challenges that professional services leaders need to address and the strategies required to overcome them effectively.
1. The Predicament of Skills Matching
An astounding 45% of businesses report difficulty in skills matching as a substantial obstacle. This is reinforced by data on skills tracking and management from the Resource Management Institute, which found that 60% of PS organizations do not believe their current skills database effectively supports their needs, and that 27% of organizations are using Excel or Access to to physically store their skills database.
Addressing the skills matching challenge is critical as firms expand their scope of work, which in turn increases the complexity and variety of necessary skills and tasks. The hectic pace of day-to-day operations can lead to misalignment and underutilization of crucial skills. Embracing comprehensive skills databases and robust resource management tools becomes non-negotiable to smartly deploy teams and ensure that the right resources are assigned to the right projects swiftly and efficiently.
2. Optimization Hurdles with Existing Tools
For 45% of professional services organizations, the project management tools they use are seen as a barrier to optimizing skills across projects effectively. Optimal resource optimization requires a nuanced understanding of utilization rates and a dynamic approach to work allocation. Put bluntly, not all project management solutions are created equal – many project management solutions are not designed with the complex staffing and resource forecasting requirements of professional services organizations in mind. Among businesses that were primarily using collaborative work management (CWM) solutions like Monday.com or Asana to drive service delivery, one of the biggest challenges identified in S&P Global’s research was that these solutions do not enable to organization’s to easily do detailed resource management and capacity planning. This is why Professional Services Cloud platforms are so important. Solutions that are designed to provide accurate forecast metrics on both PS supply (resources) and demand (projects) can offer invaluable insights that help businesses find the optimal balance that maximizes employee productivity without risking burnout, thus enhancing overall profitability.
3. Inadequacy in Supporting Upskilling Initiatives
With 39% of companies struggling to find sufficient tools and technologies to facilitate their upskilling strategies, it’s clear there’s a pressing need for more capable solutions. Upskilling isn’t just about enhancing employee skill sets; it’s about aligning those skills strategically with business needs to improve utilization rates and operational efficiencies. Effective upskilling requires resource management software that can pinpoint skill gaps, recommend relevant training, and implement strategic development paths for employees, thus contributing directly to the company’s success.
The Ripple Effect of Effective Skill Management
The implications of effectively managing and leveraging skills extend far beyond immediate project successes. Understanding your available skills, how they can be applied to your regularly-delivered projects, and where your company may be coming up short is critical to not just improving your performance right now, but making the right decisions for the future of your organization.
According to TestGorilla’s The State of Skills-Based Hiring report, a staggering 76% of employers now prioritize skills-based hiring, with role-specific skill tests being a crucial component of the recruitment process for 55% of them. A profound understanding of your team’s capabilities and the strategic application of these skills can thus significantly enhance hiring efficacy.
How the Kantata Professional Services Cloud Empowers Teams
Addressing these challenges head-on requires more than a generic solution—it demands a purpose-built platform that’s engineered with the unique needs of professional services firms in mind. This is where Kantata Professional Services Cloud shines. By amalgamating resource management, project management, and business intelligence, Kantata transcends the traditional limitations of point and legacy solutions, enabling you to accurately forecast performance, smartly deploy teams, and address the complexity of skills matching with unprecedented precision.
Discover how Kantata can elevate your team’s capabilities and transform your operational efficiency, guiding your firm to new heights of success in a constantly evolving industry.