Professional Services Automation Blog

Growth, Accelerated – 2012 Professional Services Benchmark Report

Steve Chong | Published April 6, 2012

The second half of 2010 saw the professional services market starting to emerge from one of the worst recessions in decades. Organizations were just starting to hire, and all of the key indicators, such as annual revenues, bill rates, and backlogs, were trending up. Last year, Service Performance Insight, in their annual PS Maturity Benchmark Report, predicted accelerated growth in 2011, and advised services organizations how to position themselves to capitalize on the nascent economic recovery.

True to form—and despite natural disasters in Asia, revolution in the Middle East, impending economic meltdown in southern Europe, and a sluggish recovery in the US—the global professional services market did indeed experience strong growth in 2011. SPI Research’s 2012 Professional Services Benchmark Report shows most key performance indicators significantly up, but not quite back to pre-recession levels, indicating both strength in the market and room for additional growth. Continue reading »

Professional Services | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

How to Create Projector Reports from Scratch – Part 2

Gregory Smith | Published October 20, 2011

In our last blog post we talked about all of the different report types available in Projector’s professional services automation software and discussed how to choose the best one. In this post we explore how to customize these reports to get the information you are looking for right at your fingertips.Utilization by Department Trend Chart

Customizing reports in Projector gives you access to the treasure trove of data that is within the system. You can use a customized report to do some hairsplitting analysis on resource profitability or you could use UDFs (user defined fields) in your report to shake out some information that isn’t natively tracked in the system. Regardless of how you would like to see your data, understanding how to create custom reports can unlock a world of information that gives you more visibility and insight into your organization.

Rolling Your Own Reports

To start creating you report from scratch you will want to head over to Projector’s reporting engine which is located on the Reports Tab. Here, clicking on the “create new reports” button will give you a list of report types to select from. In our last post How to Create Projector Reports from Scratch – Part 1 we described in detail how to select the proper report type. Once you know which report type to select it’s time to get started. For our example we are going to select the Ginsu report as our report type since it is one of the most highly configurable reports within Projector. Continue reading »

How To | Tagged , | Leave a comment

How to Create Projector Reports from Scratch – Part 1

Steve Chong | Published May 25, 2011

Beyond the Frozen Pizza

Nearly 25% of all the requests that the Projector support desk fields involves helping people find, customize, or create a report to give them visibility into a particular piece of information. That’s not surprising as when we designed Projector’s reporting engine, we intentionally wanted to put a lot of the tools and raw ingredients into the hands of our users to allow them to shape reports to their liking, sort of the gourmet kitchen and well-stocked pantry of the reporting world. With all of those tools, however, come a lot of options. Continue reading »

How To, Projector | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Top 10 Ways to Get the Most Out of Projector

Steve Chong | Published April 20, 2011

One of the great joys of designing and building a software product that is used by a myriad of different people in a myriad of different companies is helping them understand some new and novel ways they can get the most out of Projector. Some of these best practices come from how we thought about how Projector should be used when we designed the professional services automation suite in the first place. Many come from ideas and approaches that you, our clients and our users, have shown us. A lot of these ideas may already be familiar to you, but hopefully you’ll find in this list an unexpected gem or two that could help you make your experience with Projector richer and more efficient. Continue reading »

How To, Projector | Tagged | Leave a comment

Capitalizing on the Recovering Economy with Professional Services Automation

Larry Krakauer | Published February 17, 2011

2008 and 2009 saw one of the toughest economic climates in decades hit the professional services industry. Services firms with customers rooted in the hardest-hit sectors of the economy—manufacturing, construction, and financial services—or whose offerings were considered discretionary spending by their clients often felt the pain of layoffs, cost cutting, or insolvency. Organizations that were left turned inwards, focusing on shrinking smartly, managing morale, and simply surviving.

Fast-forward to 2010. According to this year’s 2011 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark report, many of the leading indicators for growth—annual revenue growth, headcount, backlog—were all up significantly. Average bill rates were up, as were salaries, all indicating that 2010 and 2011 herald the start of a strong recovery for the professional services sector. What a difference a year or two makes. Continue reading »

Professional Services | Tagged , , , , ,
 
More info below