How to gain more control over your operations and portfolios
Updated: April 18, 2006
Professional services firms face big hurdles when it comes to fully understanding how and why their revenues and margins change over time. Microsoft technologies can help these firms move beyond reacting to changes and enable them to maintain better control over their operations and practice portfolios.
The goal of Microsoft is to give professional services firms the capability to drill down into practices—using various financial, client, operational, and employee measures—to understand in depth a firm's performance. A firm can then take steps to proactively manage future performance, change recruiting and staffing plans, and build from existing models, service offerings, and other key factors to make the most of available resources and market opportunities.
For example, by using Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005, a professional services firm can build scorecards and industry-specific performance indicators to thoroughly examine the firm's business portfolios. A practice manager at the firm can then delve into the performance of new associates to find if their billable hours have fallen off compared to associates in years past. This might suggest the need for improvements in training and supervision to bring billable hours back to acceptable levels.
Or, a manager can review the performance evaluations of associates and find that current reviews are lower than in years past, slowing associates' career growth and development. Here again, the manager can take steps to correct the imbalance instead of waiting until the problem becomes more obvious and less manageable.
Microsoft can help spot client growth areas
Microsoft understands that firms want to know the best opportunities for client growth and how to take advantage of them. Microsoft can give professional services firms the tools to look into revenue streams and determine what practice areas are experiencing growth with the promise of high margins and what practice areas are falling into a state of decline. Firms can shift resources or revamp practice strategies to take advantage of trends that otherwise might not be apparent.
Microsoft products enable the design of systems that are cost-effective and easy to use. Microsoft can design role-based tools that help to differentiate what a firm partner needs to know from what an account supervisor needs to know. Dashboards and alerts can give at-a-glance performance evaluations and flag trouble spots. And tight integration with Microsoft Office programs can simplify training and cut costs.
Deep visibility into business operations is a new frontier for many professional services firms. Solutions and technologies from Microsoft and its partners can show these firms how to make the most of portfolio management of assets.
Portfolio management solutions from Microsoft partners
These featured partners offer portfolio management solutions built on the Microsoft platform:
ADERANT
Designed for the unique needs of law, accounting, consulting, and other professional services firms, ADERANT Expert is a powerful and customizable portfolio management solution that includes comprehensive functionality for financial, client relationship, and performance management. ADERANT Expert’s financial management solution, Expert Back Office, leverages Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to provide firms with a unified and scalable repository for their critical business data. ADERANT is a leading global provider of portfolio management solutions and helps professional services firms improve profitability, decrease operating costs, compress business process cycle times, and increase cash flow.
Thomson Elite
Elite® 3E is the next generation of the company’s flagship Elite suite of business optimization software for professional services companies built on a completely new platform based on the most advanced technologies available. 3E enables software to work the way firms work by allowing them to embed their own business processes into the applications. The easy-to-use Web-based system is an enterprise software development platform built from the ground up, leveraging patent-pending technology. The scalable platform is designed to support any size firm, including the largest in the world. 3E delivers expanded enterprise functionality with embedded workflow and collaboration.
