EPM for Professional Services

The delivery of professional services as a core business function provides a unique basis for the realisation of the business benefits offered by the EPM solution.  

Professional Services businesses are challenged daily with balancing the demands of delivering new business growth while maintaining customers' existing system, providing reactive support functions, and managing the associated resourcing implications through cycles of service demand.

Professional Services Business Challenges

• The management of resource workload requirements between project and support functions
• Differentiating between committed and proposed effort requirements and management of resource requirements
• Capturing/transferring actual billable effort into client invoices
• The efficient (automated) regular production of project status reports for client review
• The efficient (automated) regular production of project, program or portfolio reporting for internal review
• The ability to capture estimated project costs for comparison against actual delivery costs
• Poor project summary reporting such as project progress traffic light status reports
• No single repository for all project-related information such as documentation, issues and risk logs
• Inconsistent use and maintenance of documentation templates
• Providing clients with access to relevant documentation and project collaboration tools
• Providing clients with automatic access to project schedule information and updates
• The electronic capture of client document approvals including document version control

Solution

EPM Partners responds to these challenges with its preconfigured EPM-for-Professional-Services package which delivers:

• an enterprise resource pool that includes teams, generic resources, cost resources and skills - supporting resource allocation to both project and support (or other non-project) work items
• the enterprise resource management functions that allow for the inclusion/exclusion of proposed project effort
• a timesheet or project status interface to capture actual resources spent on project and non-project tasks, combined with powerful reporting functions to support the generation of client invoices
• client-ready project status reports that reference all project aspects
• traffic light reports relating to projects, programs and portfolios
• baseline cost capture and control with online access to actual effort comparisons and traffic light reports
• the automated creation of template-driven SharePoint project workspaces where documents, risks, issues, change requests and other project data is recorded, version-controlled and centrally maintained
• document template storage and content management supporting immediate application of changes to all new workspace documents
• client-facing project workspaces displaying the latest project schedule and collaboration tools
• client-facing project workspaces supporting the review of project documents including version control and electronic capture of client approvals

EPM Partners' EPM-for-Professional-Services combines the knowledge of professional services business requirements with tool configurations to deliver a pre-configured EPM package.  EPM-for-Professional-Services is available for internal deployment to the client's infrastructure, or through the EPM Partners On-Demand solution.