Definitions of Key Project-Related PS Enterprise Metrics (1 of 3)

Alan Birchenough

"You can't manage what you can't (or don't) measure"; so the saying goes. It follows that, from the individual consultant or subcontractor up to the lofty heights of the VP of Professional Services (PS), across to Finance, and upstream to Sales, we need quantitative information about the performance of the business processes in our domain. Appirio's Professional Services Enterprise (PS Enterprise) product provides a full suite of metrics for this purpose, all of which can be seen at the Project, Region, Practice and Group levels, on individual records, in list views and on reports and dashboards, and for any configured time period. The entire power of salesforce.com reporting is at our disposal, so we can have confidence in being able to obtain "optics" on any aspect of our business.

This is the first of a three-part blog series talking about enterprise metrics and how PS Enterprise can help an organization measure its performance.

So what does the domain of Professional Services (PS) basically consist of? Like all business-process-intensive domains it consists, at the operational levels, of a cascade of "transactions" forming a value chain. (In this sense, we use the word "transaction" generally, to include longer-running interactions, not just the short ones familiar from the world of databases.) Opportunities spawn Projects (as they transition from Sales to Professional Services proper), which in turn spawn resource Assignments and Milestones (especially on Fixed Fee projects). Once we have Assignments, these can then give rise to Timecards and Expenses. Finally, as the value chain passes from Professional Services through to Accounts Receivable (AR), Timecards and Expenses (plus any Miscellaneous Adjustments) spawn Billing Events, which will end up on invoices in AR. As a side effect, labor, expense, and "other" cost transactions are generated and must be accounted for. We shall also be interested in a PS view (as opposed to the "official" accounting view) of revenue generated by PS labor and pass-through expense billing.

Importantly, we are in the business, too, of managing Resources across Projects, from their on-boarding through to their exit from our organization. However, this time around, for the sake of brevity, we'll focus on some of the key Project-related metrics. Resource-related metrics like skills and utilization will have to wait until a future occasion.