How to Select the Right Consulting Management Software for Your Industry

Consulting Management Software for Creative and Digital Marketing Agencies

Professional Services Automation, sometimes referred to as Consulting Management Software, is a very broad term that different software providers have given multiple meanings. Vendors within this space often attach the term to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Human Capital Management (HCM), muddying the definition. Software providers also label their products as “PSA” despite only managing very specific functions, while others are only specialized to serve certain industries.

Projector PSA has compiled the below guide to the audiences we serve, and the feature sets our application offers. This guide is designed to help organizations searching for a solution to meet their needs, and scale efficiently alongside their business.

Projector was built from the ground up to support integrated marketing agencies in their efforts to build profitable workflows that deliver premier work to their clients. Since inception, Projector has helped growth-minded marketing agencies scale efficiently and thrive amidst constantly evolving client priorities.

Resource Scheduling

Projector’s advanced resource scheduling capabilities help you manage your teams, using your limited resources in the most efficient, best possible way so that you can keep up with the dynamic nature of creative work.

Projector can handle all kinds of scheduling needs: specific, general, and intermittent. When clients come back with last-minute changes, Projector’s Resourcing Dashboard gives resource managers shortcuts to quickly accept and reject resource requests, assign resources to roles, and make changes on the fly.

The Resourcing Dashboard also enables project leaders to configure the level of overallocation that triggers visual overallocation alerts, as well as to configure the level of availability that triggers visual availability alerts. Projector can also tell you if you have more work than people, and need to hire additional employees or contractors to fill the void. It can answer questions about what locations, titles, or skills will have the most unmet demand.

Project Accounting

Projector can report profitability at a client level to give management a full understanding of the impact of the business development work, spec creative, account management, and other investment required to win and service your clients. The application also reports profit by department, title, location, and resource to give management a thorough understanding of each delivery team’s effectiveness.

Projector’s alerts, automatic reminder emails, and mobile-friendly, intuitive time and expense entry interfaces make it easy for resources to enter billable hours, project costs, and status updates. These features relieve stress on project managers, and provide total visibility into ongoing project profitability.

Technology/IT Companies

Projector’s PSA software suite aligns with the mission-critical needs of project-centric technology, as well as consulting groups that provide technology implementation, integration, and other complementary services. Projector’s features have been guided by deep, executive-level expertise within the technology industry, extensive partnerships with our technology-focused client base, and robust integrations with leading service platforms.

Projector PSA entrusts managing its own product implementation team to Projector software, which also provides firsthand insight into product best practices. The application can also incorporate management of other incoming revenue, such as revenue from product sales, licensing, and subcontracting.

Projector’s flexible project structure allows you to model and track all kinds of projects, including a fixed price initial implementation, maintenance on a time and materials agreement, retainer-based support, or a combination of all three. The application also simplifies revenue capture from activities and sales beyond fee income, so you can measure and understand your whole-project profitability.

Advanced Analytics

Projector’s out-of-the-box dashboards and reports empower users to roll up or drill down to the level of detail that you want to analyze your business and get answers about what’s really going on. Users can also break the numbers down by client, project type, office, region, or product line. Product companies with internal consulting organizations will appreciate Projector’s ability to model and manage non-billable development and marketing projects along with the billable consulting projects.

Project Management

Projector can model large, multi-person, long-term projects that require hundreds of interdependent tasks, as well as seamlessly manage more straightforward projects. The software’s detailed task-level planning models each project individually based on the level of complexity required. You can turn project plans into estimates or resource requests in only a few clicks.

Additionally, Projector can be leveraged to model and manage other types of client work, including support activities, maintenance, staff-augmentation, managed services, and resale of software and hardware technology components.

Integrations

Projector’s modules, Advanced Analytics, Project Accounting, Resource Scheduling, and Project Management, work as one seamless system.

Projector includes pre-built connectors for:

  • Microsoft Dynamics GP
  • QuickBooks
  • Salesforce
  • Microsoft Project

If your software isn’t on the list, either our development team or yours can use Projector’s web services to create a custom integration for any pre-existing system in your technology stack.

Healthcare Consulting Services

High-performing services teams within the healthcare industry leverage Projector PSA as their centralized operational platform to deliver projects with confidence, empower remarkable service performance and scale. The healthcare industry is experiencing tremendous opportunities and challenges centered on organizational change, digital and analytics capabilities, customer-centricity, value-based care, and a proliferation of complex partnerships.

Projector drives visibility and alignment across the key drivers of resource utilization, project profitability, and delivery success for healthcare consulting and professional services firms who deliver project-based work. This empowers services teams to focus their time and efforts on improving health outcomes and creating value for patients, health care professionals, and society.

Resource Scheduling

Projector monitors firm-wide performance and communicates if teams are on-track to reach their delivery goals so they can make strategic adjustments to balance their organization’s resources and delivery demands. The resource scheduling module enables visibility throughout an organization’s entire resource pool, communicating the impact of individual staffing decisions on the profitability of both a project and the firm as a whole. As a result, teams have the ability to anticipate the financial implications of project delivery, ensure the right mix of resources to deliver client expectations, and achieve profitability goals.

Project Management

Projector’s project management tool provides a single project workspace to keep a pulse on all aspects of your projects, including client communication, task planning, role assignments, and detailed budgeting. Projector provides early indicators for project performance, such as tracking a budget’s estimate-at-completion, in addition to actuals-to-date. As a result, teams gain confidence in their ability to understand what it will take to successfully handle incoming projects in the pipeline.

Project Delivery

Projector supports the day-to-day operational aspects of running a services firm by ensuring a proactive and efficient approach to project delivery at scale. As a result, our customers are able to anticipate and tackle the increasingly complex nature of healthcare operations and delivery. This equips our customers to innovate new services for their clients and deepen client relationships.

Projector empowers services teams to oversee project delivery on a daily basis. As examples, Projector alleviates administrative frustrations with time entry and expenses, alerts leaders about projects that are at risk of going over budget, and helps teams proactively respond to multiple project fluctuations simultaneously.

Projector surfaces trustworthy data across multiple views into your people, your projects, and your performance to unlock more timely and informed conversations across the organization. This enables our customers the ability to focus less on reacting to the past and more on optimizing revenue realization or delivering remarkable projects that enhance patient outcomes and information technology solutions.

Integrations

Projector is designed to plug directly into the existing business systems that healthcare organizations use. Examples of systems that Projector can integrate with include accounting systems, CRM software, Business Intelligence tools, and project management solutions. If a specific software is not on our list of pre-built integrations, we are happy to discuss custom integrations and have worked with clients in the past to do so.

Business and Management Consulting Firms

Projector provides an operational foundation for any organization that provides expertise on a consulting basis, whether in marketing, engineering, finance, environmental, change management, human resources, or any other knowledge area.

Projector’s integrated modules, Advanced Analytics, Project Accounting, Resource Scheduling, and Project Management work together to solve consulting firms’ biggest challenges of assigning people to projects and maintaining profitability.

Resource Management

Projector removes the uncertainty around managing multiple projects and a team of consultants. The Resource Scheduling module gives you the ability to track the attributes of each of your consultants, including skills, certifications, competencies, preferences, and experience. This powerful feature enables project leaders to assign people to key tasks, as well as gain insight into hiring needs, utilization, revenue and profitability.

Operational Agility

Projector meets consultants where they are with online and mobile time entry, so they can log billable hours at the client site, the airport, back at the office, or anywhere in between. Consultants’ assigned projects show up automatically in their time sheets, so they never have to look anything up.

Administrative staff can keep in touch by setting up outbound emails and alerts in Projector to remind consultants to enter time and expenses (reducing revenue leakage) or to notify them about scheduling changes. Online project workspaces provide anytime, anywhere access to project assets and documents, customer and billing information, and issues tracking.

Billing and Invoicing

Projector’s flexible billing system supports all invoicing practices, including time-based hourly or daily billing as well as fixed-price projects with delivery milestones or not-to-exceed contracts.

The software’s revenue management tools provide control over the timing and quantity of client invoicing, distinct from internal revenue recognition, and can accommodate pre-payments and holdbacks.

Project Tracking

Projector’s project tracking features, informed by institutional knowledge and deep partnerships with client, provide real-time performance tracking and revenue forecasting. Resource requests combine with actual time and expenses and budgets to present a powerful early warning system that identifies projects in trouble. Projector can also compare project plans to consultant-entered time and percent complete data to gauge the health of a project before it starts showing symptoms. No manual data entry is required. Projector also lets you set up automatic email alerts that warn you when projects are at risk of going over budget.

Cybersecurity and Compliance Consultants

High-performing services teams within the cybersecurity and compliance services industry leverage Projector PSA as their centralized operational platform to deliver projects with confidence, empower remarkable service performance and scale. Projector drives visibility and alignment across the key drivers of resource utilization, project profitability, and delivery success for security and risk management professionals who deliver project-based work.

Adaptability to Volume Spikes

Projector’s resource scheduling tool communicates the impact of individual staffing decisions on the profitability of both a project and the firm as a whole. As a result, teams have the ability to anticipate the financial implications of project delivery, ensure the right mix of resources to deliver client expectations, and achieve profitability goals.

Projector’s project management tool provides a single project workspace to keep a pulse on all aspects of your projects, including client communication, task planning, role assignments, and detailed budgeting. Projector provides early indicators for project performance, such as tracking a budget’s estimate-at-completion, in addition to actuals-to-date. As a result, teams gain confidence in their ability to understand what it will take to successfully handle incoming projects in the pipeline.

Operational Scaling

Projector enables scale while ensuring operational efficiency and a proactive approach to project delivery. Projector acts as the centralized operational platform for services teams so they can focus their time and energy on responding to clients’ robust cybersecurity program needs.

Projector surfaces trustworthy data across multiple views into your people, your projects, and your performance to unlock more timely and informed conversations across the organization. Projector’s real-time dashboards provide high-level views that quickly pinpoint delivery areas that need attention. As a result, our customers focus less time trying to identify potential problems, and more time serving clients to manage cybersecurity threats and compliance mandates.

Projector PSA Logo 2020

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