Designed to Perform

When we first set out to design Projector, we had a single goal in mind: to help professional services organizations perform better.

We believe that successful professional services firms don’t become successful by accident.

Yes, they need to employ great people with innovative ideas. Perhaps just as importantly, they need to support those people with systems and processes to allow them to thrive. We designed Projector to be that system.

All that sounds entirely self-evident—until you realize just how few Professional Services Automation vendors actually design their products with that end goal in mind: a simple goal of measurably improving performance. Our competitors boast about the technology platform they run on. Or how their latest corporate acquisition fits in with their portfolio of poorly integrated offerings. Or the fact that they can customize the product’s user interface with the colors of a user’s alma mater.

We take a different philosophy and have consciously chosen to ignore the frivolous to concentrate on the meaningful. Every little product design decision we make, each educational experience we craft, every discussion we have with our users is focused on giving our clients a competitive advantage over their peers…and that focus on performance shows.

Data from the industry’s most comprehensive benchmark survey, which is conducted by independent analyst firm SPI Research, shows that firms that chose Projector as their PSA solution simply perform better. No matter what other PSA product other firms chose—from offerings by larger organizations such as Microsoft, FinancialForce, or Oracle/NetSuite/OpenAir to smaller ones like Kimble—none could compete with Projector clients. But, don’t take that assertion at face value…we’ll take you on a step-by-step tour of the metrics, the data, and the analysis to show you how each of the different products stacks up against Projector:

Projector: Delivering Consistent Results

Measuring a Services Firm
There are lots of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can be used to compare the performance of organizations that use different Professional Services Automation (PSA) solutions. Here, we’ve gathered the principal KPIs that are affected by PSA solutions.

We’ll start out with a fully fleshed-out comparison so you can see where we’re headed. But don’t worry, we’ll later take it apart and explain it step-by-step.
Promoting Transparency
You might notice that we’re not showing metrics for the other top five vendors individually. We’re all about promoting transparency, which is why we are showing our own performance data. However, we’ve been asked to not publish other vendors’ metrics.

If you’re interested in digging into this data a little further, contact us, and we’d love to talk in more detail. Or, feel free to ask our competition how they perform, and see how willing they are to be this transparent.
Measuring Operations
At any rate, to help make sense of these metrics, we can classify them into different categories.

The first is how efficiently the organization performs operationally. This may include metrics like how much overhead is required to support the billable, revenue-generating part of the business.
Measuring Delivery Performance
The second key set of KPIs measures how efficiently and successfully the firm is able to deliver projects. This includes the processes the organization puts in place to ensure projects are delivered on time and under budget.
Measuring Financials
Financial performance measures how profitably the organization’s projects are delivered. One of the factors that affects profitability is how much of the work performed is ultimately billed to the client versus how much is lost to revenue leakage.
Measuring Satisfaction
Ultimately, the performance of the organization and of the systems it uses can be summarized up into two key satisfaction measures. The first is how willing clients are to serve as a reference. The second is how happy firms are with their choice of PSA solution.
Combating Data Overload
With all of these metrics in place, it’s time to start evaluating how organizations using different PSA solutions perform. Surveys like SPI Research’s annual benchmark provide a wealth of great raw data. With so much data, however, it takes a little work to make sense of all that numerical information.
Normalizing by Force Ranking
One way to do so is to force-rank the results by KPI so that comparing the different solutions is a little easier and more consistent. You no longer have to think about whether bigger is better (such as with billable utilization) or whether smaller is better (like revenue unable to be billed).
Identifying High Performers
Even better, we can highlight the solutions that rank first, second, and third in performance for each KPI.

Again, in the interest of transparency, we’re showing our own performance individually, but have been asked to not show other competitors’ rankings.
Creating an Aggregated Score
With these ranks, we can create an aggregated score that summarizes how often a solution performs better than its peers.

We can also create a visualization, often called a heat map, that provides a great overall perspective of performance. A heat map, along with the aggregated score, is more easily scannable.
Isolating a Business Problem
This heat map is useful if you have a particular business problem, such as the effectiveness of your resource management infrastructure, that you're trying to solve.
Identifying Solutions
It’s also particularly useful if you’re trying to optimize your operations overall and want a solution that performs well across the board.

Projector may not score in the number one ranked slot for every metric, but it’s the only solution that performs so highly across the board.
Feeling Left Out
What’s particularly interesting to note here is how poorly organizations who don’t use a Professional Services Automation solution fare. Without the proper planning, tracking, and monitoring systems in place, these firms are unable to compete effectively across almost all the key metrics.
Going it Alone
Similarly, organizations who built their own homegrown PSA tools are also unable to compete across the board. Not only do they perform poorly, but they are also saddled with the additional burden of maintaining and updating those systems. Instead, they could be spending their time more productively concentrating on delivering great work.
Benchmarking Your Firm
If you’re interested in exploring this data in more detail and seeing how your firm stacks up, take a look at our Interactive Scorecard. With it, you can benchmark your own firm against market averages, organizations that use other products, and Projector clients. It’s a great tool to help you figure out where you should start looking to improve the performance of your own professional services firm.
Focusing on Satisfaction
Users’ satisfaction with their PSA solution is the ultimate measure of the impact of their choice on their business. So, it’s often useful to look at satisfaction historically, rather than at a single point in time.

Projector users have been consistently happier with their choice than those who chose other PSA solutions.

All of this data tells a compelling story about how Projector clients perform as compared to those of other PSA solutions on average. But, what does this mean for your business?

If you’d like to see how your firm compares up against those that use the different PSA solutions, take a look at our Interactive Performance Scorecard.

What's your score:
Get your Professional Services Performance Scorecard.

View your Scorecard

You may not be at a point of wanting to invest in implementing a new PSA solution—or maybe you are desperate to do so. Either way, the scorecard will give you a great benchmark to help you prioritize where you may want to focus, whether it is improving utilization, boosting profitability, or streamlining resource scheduling. It will also identify some additional reading material about your specific areas of interest that may be of use as you continue along your own performance improvement journey.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Knowing a Formula 1 car’s specs like its horsepower rating is one thing. Experiencing the visceral thrill of one at full throttle opening up on a straightaway is something altogether different. Now that you’ve seen some of Projector’s performance numbers, let us help you experience it in person.

What to Expect
Fill out the form to the right and one of our sales consultants will contact you via email to set up a time to talk. All of our demos are highly personalized, so they’ll want to learn a little bit about your business, the pain points you’re trying to solve, and the key metrics you’d like to influence before jumping into Projector.

Data Privacy and Use
Your privacy is important to us. We will never rent or sell your information to any 3rd parties or collect more information than necessary to provide the products, services, or offerings you are requesting. If you would no longer like to receive communications from us, you may opt out at any time. Please read our Privacy Policy for the details.

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