It’s a changing and challenging world for service-based organizations. Expansion into larger and even global markets brings with it a host of new concerns such as unfamiliar expectations, different cost structures and work practices, and new business partners.

For example, global customers are demanding more business accountability and instituting new mechanisms to monitor compliance. Clients want more visibility into service delivery and billing processes. Workforce profiles vary widely across geographies, making it hard to maintain portfolios of key talent. In fact, talent management is identified by executives as one of their two biggest challenges. Challenges like these reflect the complexity of global business today and add to the overall risk that service organizations already face.

With that in mind, let’s look at three broad areas of focus that can help your organization better manage project lifecycles and set your team up for long-term success, one project at a time.

1.  Embrace a digital transformation 

We’ve seen how technology has positively impacted us all as individuals and economies. But how can it specifically affect your service project process?

In the same way that harnessing emerging technologies empowers your organization to nimbly anticipate and adjust to quickly evolving market changes and consumer demands, from an internal project management perspective it can provide integration, information, and more rapid adaptation to changing circumstances.

For example, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation (PSA) provides an integrated end-to-end software solution for planning and managing multi-day projects, optimizing resource utilization, tracking and approving project tasks and finances, and monitoring performance metrics for customer-facing collaborative engagements. It helps project-based organizations build trusted customer relationships and develop a solid reputation for delivering outstanding project experiences by integrating all phases of a project’s lifecycle:

• Opportunity management
• Project planning
• Resource management
• Team collaboration
• Time and expenses
• Billing
• Service analytics

With real-time data and full integration, your team is much better prepared to plan and execute with excellence across all stages of the lifecycle.

Companies succeeding at digital transformation are doing four things: Becoming more engaged with their customers, empowering their employees, optimizing how they run their business operations, and transforming the products and services they offer using digital content. The dimensions aren’t new, but what has changed is the role that systems of intelligence now play, providing better insight from data and converting that into intelligent action.

Companies that embrace intelligent customer engagement as a strategy view emerging technology as a vehicle to transform their business and create new opportunities to grow their bottom line.

2.  Stay agile 

Similarly, a business that responds in a more agile fashion to the twists and turns of fate will see more success, scale faster, and cope better with the challenges that come with growth.

This approach becomes critically important when we look at a project’s lifecycle, and in how your team can remain informed, active, and responsible as a project’s circumstances, components and even goals can change.

It’s one thing to adopt the acceptance of change. But how do you act on it? Again, information and integration are key, and PSA software can offer a solution.

The sooner you have the information you need to make business-critical decisions, the better. Here are a few examples where data and agility can make a big difference for your project lifecycle: 

• Monthly revenue forecasting changes weekly. This provides a view of any work that’s slipping, which means resource planning can be updated to keep utilization high.
• Consultants with time on their hands due to slipped or early-completed work can be assigned to help the sales team close new deals. The sales team can be strategically directed to focus on project work matching the available skill sets.
• Information from sales on what’s in the pipeline and the likelihood of winning it advises senior management and resource planners on what new hires or cross training to invest in to meet upcoming demand.
• Cash flow improves because invoicing is accurate and ready within hours of the project’s completion. Why wait until the end of the month to send it out?
• Monthly senior management meetings go weekly, or even daily. Today, management interventions often come too late to be useful. Increased, real-time and accurate visibility means they can make small, strategic nudges to the business or individual projects as needed, bypassing the need for wholesale interventions.

These examples of agility lead to increased resource utilization, and most importantly, increased profits and scalability.

3.  Always iterate

Transformation and agility are both ongoing commitments in themselves, and it’s important to apply that iterative perspective to your lifecycle overall.

Iteration allows you to evaluate and improve, and requires both narrow and broad data to support it. Look granularly, look in the long-view. Also, open the iteration process across the entire project team, inviting collaboration even after a project is completed. Not only does this provide valuably different perspectives, it involves your staff in ways that empower, encourage, and ultimately help retain professional talent.

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No date is more crucial to the value of your brand than a deadline. Whether you hit it or you miss it, your clients’ perspective on what you offer them and how you stack up against your competition will change.

And the differences between performing or not are stark. The top 5% of project-based organizations at the pinnacle of collaborative and portfolio excellence delivered 91% of the projects on-time last year. By contrast, only 66% of the projects delivered by the bottom 55% came in on time.

With that in mind, here are three quick areas of focus that can help you manage process and hit that delivery date.

1.  Right scheduling

Setting your projects’ lifecycle isn’t always up to you. Client needs and market forces can certainly determine deadlines more than you might prefer. Regardless, you can and should establish well-validated methods for setting appropriate scope and timing for your projects, and in the process, set yourself up for success.

While it’s of utmost importance to please clients, unreasonable expectations will only harm you in the long run. Instead, keep bigger goals in mind like long-term client success and satisfaction. Not just a “when do you need it” mentality. Use project histories and fully integrated software solutions like Project Service Automation (PSA) to more accurately and reasonably forecast a project’s time and resource needs.

A solution like Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation can help establish a repeatable and predictable project-based service model with process automation and data accuracy for on-time, on-budget project delivery. It can also auto-assign resources to specific jobs based on schedule, skills, proficiency, location, or region.

2.  Agility in process

PSA software solutions also offer the advantage of real-time, full integration of data across a project’s team members and lifecycle. This is indispensable because as projects progress, change is inevitable. Your process needs to be able to remain agile and fluid to compensate in a timely manner.

Real-time information and collaborative tools that provide team-wide visibility and interaction enable the kind of decision making that can be the deciding factor on whether or not a project comes in on time and on budget.

3.  Postmortem

It is all too tempting, once a project is completed, to move on without looking back. After all, the next opportunity beckons. But fair and critical post-completion evaluation of processes is how growth-oriented organizations build on success and correct pain points.

Create an abbreviated scorecard for key projects that allows team members to collaboratively evaluate what worked well and what needs improvement. Consider letter grades or numbered scores, anonymous input or casual in-person discussions, whatever works best for your team. And make sure to seek the input of key managers on the project lifecycle and processes.

The other important number

Hitting your project delivery date is crucial, as we’ve discussed, but another important number hinges on the ability of your team to effectively schedule, adapt and evaluate—the bottom line. Organizations that have aligned people, process and technology to enable collaborative experiences across sales, project service teams and the customer achieve greater than 65% improvement in year-over-year revenue.  

The post 3 quick ways to complete your project on time appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Collaboration is a mainstay of successful business interactions. By integrating talents and resources across individuals, teams, and even companies, you’re able to build on strengths to create success that can exceed the sum of its parts.

However, as business models shift in response to scaling up, internationalization and changes in technology, collaboration is especially beneficial, even critical. Consider that just a decade ago, a majority of firms operated primarily on a time-and-materials engagement structure. Now almost half of all projects are based on a fixed-time/fixed-fee structure as client organizations demand greater predictability, accountability and value for their services spend.

The shift in approach to a fixed-time/fixed-fee pricing structure puts increased pressure on planning accuracy and operational efficiency, requiring more precision and insight to avoid over- or under-utilizing staff and resources, and to stay on top of ever-changing project needs and goals.

A key component to planning and allocation success is collaboration, breaking down barriers between individuals and teams in order to share the right information and take the right action, using tools that are custom-built for the modern project lifecycle.

Let’s take a look at those aspects in a little more detail.

1.  Transparency

Siloing of information and teams is no longer tenable, and it is vital for your organization to embrace a new level of transparency to build a workplace where it’s easy for professionals to find and share information about clients, access all available expertise, and apply preferred practices widely. Encourage the free flow of information and make sure to build transparency into your process and question what stands in the way of sharing information.

As you remove barriers, you will notice several benefits:

• Greater ability to react in real time or near-to-real
• Greater efficiency in decision making
• Synchronized perspectives as all team members are working from the same data

Information sharing should be a cornerstone of any modern, efficient process.

2.  Responsibility

Empowering team members allows for more accurate resource allocation and better ongoing management of those resources. Plus, you get a more productive, more loyal workforce.

Spreading project responsibility more broadly across your team and fostering individual contribution and creativity can result in benefits such as:

• Greater accuracy in planning and resource allocation
• Greater ability to assign the right roles and right skills per project
• Increased speed and alignment in decision making
• Improved job satisfaction and team retention

One word of caution—approach any increase in shared responsibility with a plan. Make sure your team is trained, aware of best practices, enmeshed in project insights, and armed with the tools to help them succeed.

3.  The right tools

Software like Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation (PSA) can provide an end-to-end process framework that facilitates collaboration across internal and external teams, and brings together many disparate but necessary elements of your project.

By providing a single system of customer engagement for sales, resourcing, delivery, and billing, you can increase operational visibility and improve process efficiency, not to mention allowing for scalability and increased security.

A few additional benefits of PSA software include:

• Visibility into services that yield the highest profitability and growth potential
• Enhanced resource visibility leading to efficient staffing and enhanced staff productivity
• Standardized and streamlined selling, quoting and delivery processes
• Improved service delivery quality, consistency and repeatability
• Efficient billing, cash collection and revenue recognition

In conclusion, today’s systems allow organizations to be agile, flat, and adaptive. And the more collaborative your teams are, the stronger your chance of shared success. 

The post Tips to improve project collaboration appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As you initiate any project of sufficient complexity or scope, balancing resources across both your organization and the lifecycle of the project is key. In this post, we’re going to discuss elements of planning, assigning and managing that are crucial to your project’s success.

Common to all stages, however, is an immediate and ongoing need for data. Real-time data allows you as a project owner to maintain proper resource allocation and balance, making adjustments as needed and executing without delay.

The growth and sophistication of modern products like Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation (PSA) has helped integrate all pipelines of a project’s data, integrating the critical management domains of sales, resource management, and service delivery. With real-time data at your fingertips, it becomes possible to maintain resource balance and improve productivity in even the most complicated of projects.

Beyond that, let’s take a look at three areas of focus for improving resource management.

1.  Collaborate in planning

Collaboration is important throughout a project’s lifecycle, but in the planning phases it becomes essential. Sales managers, project managers and all key project personnel need to work very closely together to estimate, define, and scope the work ahead using data based in past experience or project templates.

The team must determine cost, effort, and sales value of the work during the proposal process and, where possible, visualize those components to enable efficient sharing, understanding, and comparison. This helps ensure credible estimate-to-completion planning and financial integrity.

2.  Empower your team to assign resources

Once a plan is established, resources must be assigned before the project can begin.

Empower your staff and team members to play vital roles in resource allocation through transparency and insights, giving them ownership of appropriate project needs. Not only does this help ensure right roles and right skills are assigned through a more granular managerial approach, it can also increase job satisfaction and improve retention.

3.  Manage resources through data and adaptation

Managing resources is an ongoing, continually changing effort, and keeping a project on-track once it has begun can be one of the most taxing phases of the process. Even though a thorough and integrated plan has been created and the right resources have been allocated to the right endeavors, things will change. Agility still applies. This is where real-time data and collaboration offer great benefits.

As you collect and analyze resource data on a weekly or even daily basis, be sure to synchronize across all facets of your project. Then provide a method of tracking progress and allocation that uses a variety of easily compared metrics. The more visual, the better.

Much like the planning phase, here again collaboration takes on an important role. Communicate and collaborate with key project personnel to ensure you are all able to adapt to changing information, needs, and goals.

How process determines project success

Every company, every project, every team is different. But by focusing on the core areas of collaborative planning, delegated resource assignment, and adaptive resource management, you can improve the process that determines your projects’ profitability and ultimate success.

The post 3 ways to improve resource management for your projects appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Originally published on spiresearch.com/spiglass by: R. David Hofferberth, PE 

Organizations in every market must focus on operating at peak levels of efficiency, while providing high-quality products and services their customers demand.  Most companies have moved different aspects of their business to the cloud, as it offers greater collaboration, visibility and efficiency, along with lower operational costs.

The cloud was just the beginning

One of the major benefits of cloud-based computing is that everything has become a service. There is software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and others. The fact is, everything has become a service, and organizations have been able to take advantage of this new operational paradigm, not only to save money, but also to drive greater efficiency and better to collaborate around the world.  Independent software vendors (ISVs) can develop and run one version of their solution where every organization has the latest version and can access it from anywhere, anytime.

Everything-as-a-Service (EaaS) enables people and devices to better communicate and therefore keep better informed in terms of changes and challenges in the market. The Internet of things (IoT) is for real. The goal is to provide greater visibility and flexibility, as well as communicating situational change in real-time, so that prescriptive action can be taken.  This paradigm shift impacts everything, from a refrigerator that communicates to the service provider that there are problems with the condenser, to a professional services executive who finds out one of their major projects is about to go over-budget.

Companies in every market look to consolidate their application infrastructure

Years ago most companies built large, costly information technology departments.  It was really their only choice in order to leverage information for competitive advantage. Over the past decade many of these organizations have worked to consolidate the number of applications they use, preferring to run their operations on a single platform.  Obviously, choices dwindle as organizations work on “one throat to choke”, meaning the SaaS provider manages the complete customer experience, from deployment through implementation, support and any potential upgrades.  And the benefits are obvious – single platform solutions offer greater integration, which ultimately lowers cost, improves visibility across the organization, and makes employees more productive. Having all of this run in the cloud further lowers cost and provides a safer, more secure infrastructure for an increasingly remote workforce.   Utilizing a “one-stop-service” provider also includes customer support (self-serve and assisted), field service (break-fix with proactive IoT), Project service (for multi-day engagements) and other services, which further reduce time, cost and hassle to the organization.  

Let your solution provider partner take care of your technical issues

The movement to a more Everything-as-a-Service economy will enable companies to better focus on the products and services they work to develop, deliver and support. The technology infrastructure, and the partner providing it, are critical in any company’s efforts to improve their competitive position.  The need to increase efficiency as well as innovation, communication and collaboration will only succeed through the introduction of information technology, focused on the services sector.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation is an end-to-end solution for project-based businesses developed on an everything-as-a-service delivery framework. This framework enables organizations to leverage resources and skillsets across multiple modes of service including self-service, assisted service, field service and project service automation, and provides the ability to manage the customer service delivery model through unified contracts and centralized customer engagement.

R. David Hofferberth, PE, is the founder and principal analyst of Service Performance Insight (SPI Research). In 1999 he introduced to the market the solution area now known as Professional Services Automation (PSA), when he published the seminal report: Professional Services Automation: Increasing Efficiencies and Profitability in Professional Services Organizations.

His firm advises professional services firms and solution providers on trends and challenges facing the professional services market, and how technology adoption can accelerate performance and profit. 

The post This just in, “Everything-as-a-Service” appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Not all customers are happy. And some of those unhappy customers might be yours. Customer satisfaction is at a nine-year low, according to a recent report. For anyone in the service industry, this probably isn’t surprising. Customers are savvier than ever; they want answers to their questions immediately through the channels of their choice.

The solution to lackluster customer experiences lies in the merging of human creativity and adaptive technology that puts the priority back on to what matters: the customer. Some companies fall in line with this new world order by establishing executive positions dedicated to customer experience, such as Chief Experience Officer (CXO), Chief Customer or Client Officer (CCO), and Chief Success Officer (CSO).

Customer-focused executives exist to improve the customer experience overall. They see to it that a buyer’s experience is consistent—and better than expected—throughout every part of an engagement. They are tasked with turning one-time customers into lifetime fans.

And recent research reveals that customer executives are on the rise, suggesting that business decision makers are meeting the demand for a more “experience-focused” business approach.

The prevalence of customer service executives is on the rise

The chief in these types of positions drives customer strategy at the highest levels of an organization. The number of CCOs (and other related titles) around the world has grown from less than 10 in 2000 to more than 400 in 2014, according to the Chief Customer Officer Council (CCOC).¹ Ten percent of Fortune 500 companies have adopted the CCO role, and that number is increasing.

Though CCO roles tend to be more prevalent in technology sectors, worldwide adoption is on the rise.² And Gartner reveals that 89 percent of companies plan to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience by 2016, so we have the makings of a customer service revolution.³

Advocates for change with customer service

Although the majority of companies are not aligned to deliver seamless customer service, the leaders of the pack are already taking note—and most of them are using the power of existing customer relationship management (CRM) solutions and adapting them to customer service use cases:

• In 2012, CRM usage among business-to-business (B2B) lead buyers was at a mere 56 percent. ⁴

• A year later it had grown to 74 percent.

• Today, more than 65 percent of organizations have the equivalent of a customer executive on staff.

An example of how CRM has boosted customer service presence

Here’s a real example that demonstrates the power of CRM to revolutionize customer service.

In an effort to meet its customers wherever and whenever they need to interact, US telecommunications company nTelos Wireless launched an online customer support center in 2014. Data and analytics from the company’s CRM solution helped nTelos Wireless zero in on the most common support requests to the contact center, so it could then expand the self-service knowledge base in exactly the ways the customer needed. Right away, the results were significant:⁵

•Calls to the support center dropped 12.5 percent per subscriber in just one year.

•Wait times were reduced.

•The company’s churn fell to what it was four years prior.

By paying attention to its customers’ needs and answering their unspoken plea—”give us an opportunity to help ourselves online”—nTelos Wireless brought about a positive change in both customer loyalty and the bottom line. A customer-focused executive has the vision and the voice to make that happen.

Explore Dynamics 365 Customer Service solutions today.

Exceed your customers’ expectations

For any company among the 89 percent that see customer experience as a key differentiator in the years to come, the path is clear: it’s time to put an executive in place who will spearhead the alignment of business process to go above and beyond customer expectations.

Customer experience executives armed with knowledge, motivation, and power can make strategic moves at the corporate level to reverse that downward trend in customer satisfaction. Each day, they work toward one primary goal: make customers happy. And loyalty, naturally, will follow.

Make customer experience your key differentiator. Exceed your customers’ expectations today with Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

¹ The CCO Council Annual Chief Customer Officer Study

² The CCO Council Annual Chief Customer Officer Study

³ Importance of Customer Experience Is on the Rise; Marketing Is on the Hook

⁴ Business.com

⁵ Forbes.com

The post Why a customer experience executive is vital for any organization appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

You may not realize it, but your customers might have the best perspective on who should be your company’s next CEO. Understandably, they want the person at the helm to have the customers’ best interests in mind at every turn.

Given that 89 percent of companies plan to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience by 2016, an executive who has service on the brain is actually a sensible choice to lead a business. And customer-focused executives are often uniquely qualified to lead because they often have experience in operations, teamwork, problem solving, and leadership.

Let your customer service set your business apart

CCOs are already movin’ on up

More and more companies are creating customer-focused executive positions, such as Chief Customer Officer (CCO). In the last year alone, we’ve seen the number of CCOs nearly double to 2,000 across multiple industries. Increasingly these same executives are being tasked with greater and greater leadership responsibilities. Of the 260 random CCOs surveyed, nearly 9 out of 10 now sit on executive management teams, Forrester also reported. That’s double the rate from 2012. The executive positions themselves are being filled with people from varied backgrounds: service, yes, but also operations, general management, marketing, sales, strategy, finance, and so on.

That means these high-ranking service-minded execs are already well rounded and know the business from multiple angles—which makes them a smart bet for future placement in the highest levels of leadership.

Early on, it seemed as though there weren’t many promotion opportunities for executives in CCO roles. But recent evidence suggests that Chief Customer Officers and their service-minded peers are currently enjoying greater mobility in the C-suite.
Some companies have already realized the incredible value of these versatile, experience-minded leaders; businesses are beginning to staff executive positions with candidates who have substantial customer-focused roles on their résumés—many CCOs are eventually promoted to COO, president of a business unit, or CEO.

Customer executives are used to fighting for what they believe in

CCOs, who act as the champion for the customer, face a considerable challenge in most companies: they must convince the rest of their organization that ensuring customer success at every touch point is a prime directive. Getting execs to agree that a customer-centric strategy is needed is one thing; getting them to invest in it is another.

Wrangling buy-off and buy-in means working across many different functions, such as finance, marketing, product, support, and sales. CCOs have to be good at convincing stakeholders to work together and rally around a common cause: the customer. The ability to facilitate cross-functional collaboration and build consensus is a valuable skill for any future CEO.

Today, fewer than half of companies rate their customer experience as exceptional, but two-thirds “expect it to be” in 2 years. If the top brass is already convinced that providing exceptional customer experience is the best way forward, she or he can make it a priority throughout the organization and make that 2-year goal a reality.

Start building a future-ready customer-service strategy

Prioritization of customer experience comes from the top

Even as more companies create CCO roles, CEOs still hold all the cards as far as service-related business decisions go: a CEO is 8 times more likely to have direct control over customer experience initiatives than a CCO. But when CEOs operate from a service mindset, it pays off big. CEO leadership of customer experience has been linked to better business performance.

Moving a CCO into the CEO position only increases a company’s advantage and sets the tone for future strategic decisions. In a marketplace where customer experience is on track to overtake price and product as the key differentiator, elevating an exec from the ranks of the service organization—someone who is already passionate about customers, knowledgeable about their needs, and invested in a service mindset—to be a company’s most prominent figure makes good business sense.

Although your customers shouldn’t literally vote for your next company head, consider for a moment if they’re “voting” with their pocketbooks. Satisfied customers are loyal customers, so it’s worth looking at who is responsible for that loyalty. That person might well be the one best suited to lead your organization in the near future.

Are you ready to start building a strategy for exceptional customer experience?

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