Second week as Thwack Ambassador, and second topic. After a really nice discussion about "What features do you think a help desk solution should have?" (by the way, the discussion is still alive, if you want to join), this week I would like to talks about PSA. What? Let me give you a short introduction if you do not know what a PSA software is...
Working in the past (and somewhat even these days) for companies doing professional services to several customers, at some point of the natural growth of the business I’ve always seen that the burden of management tasks starts to become too much.
The lack of automation in repeated tasks like activity tracking, time tracking, ticket management, billing, customer projects’ management is not a real problem when you are a small IT shop and you deal with few customers; but when the company grows and there are several professionals working on the same customers, and those customers become a good number, the risk of spending too much time to track and record (and ultimately, to bill/chargeback) professional activities is a problem that needs to be addressed. After all, you want your techies to go out as much as possible to work at your customers, not sitting behind a desk filling out forms and spreadsheets, right?
At one of my previous companies, we decided at a certain point it was time to adopt a complete “professional services automation” solution (no need to promote it here, I think my post is valid for all of them) or PSA as they call it. The promise of having a software written exactly for IT professionals is something none of us can ignore, but on the other hand the effort to integrate it with our existing systems was not a trivial one, and also the training for people in order to have them use it was another big issue.
At some point I felt the project was becoming too expensive in terms of effort and time to dedicate to it (just like some stories we all have heard about ERP solutions). I changed my employer before the project was completed, so I only had second hand opinions from my past colleagues about how it went at the end. From what they told me, the effort was much bigger than we supposed at the beginning, but after some time using it the benefits started to show up. If it was overall worth the effort, I cannot say...
We did our move when we were 7 professionals and 12 total people in the company, and we had more than 200 customers, so maybe the need can be driven by an excessive complexity of daily management tasks more than based on the size of the IT company.
Did someone among you made the same move? What was your experience? Do you think the effort required to deploy and integrate a PSA solution was worthwhile? And what do you think more in general?
Luca.