Get your projects off to a great start
Updated: October 12, 2005
Making sure projects get off to a great start is a key to success for any professional services firm. Microsoft understands the importance of taking the right first steps and is designing tools to help automate and streamline much of the project initiation process.
For example, Microsoft is working to streamline the due diligence process that professional services firms rely on. This process helps firms assess risks associated with taking new clients and also helps them decide whether or not to work with a particular client.
A Microsoft solution can provide firms a tailored Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server online portal site. Here, a professional, when approached by a potential client, can query multiple databases to look for conflicts of interest, independence issues, and other considerations that preclude accepting new work.
If the client is accepted, the professional can create an account code and proceed with determining the scope of work, identifying necessary service team skills and estimating fees. Depending on the firm's policy, the professional may or may not share this information directly with the client by electronically creating a client-specific extranet portal.
A solution that's easy to access and easy to build on
During the course of negotiation and agreement about the precise scope of work, the professional can append to a growing collection of information about the client. Instead of making the professional go to many different systems, Microsoft technologies can provide a single point of data collection and subsequent distribution to the firm's many systems through a transactional integration layer. The idea is to reduce system complexity and to help the professional focus on the job at hand.
After project milestones, deliverables, and service team members are defined, the professional can requisition a team portal in a click. This integrated workspace consolidates access to key service delivery systems and can be prepopulated with client and project information, templates for standard deliverables, project tasks, and team assignments. Links to the workspace can be automatically sent through e-mail messages to team members or made available to members through their personal workspaces.
Throughout the project initiation process, professionals collect many important pieces of reusable information about the client and the work needed. All too often, these data points must be entered and reentered into many systems by a number of process support personnel. This redundancy can lead to transcription variations that undermine the reliability of critical activities such as client acceptance.
An efficient and low-risk project initiation solution does the following: Maintains a single-access method for entry and modification, accumulates data points in one place during project initiation, and transfers data to appropriate systems as required data thresholds are met. In this way, when the project is ready for kickoff, professionals only validate one version of the information, and then hit the Go button.
Microsoft, partners provide building blocks and expertise
Project initiation process details differ by profession, firm, and systems environment. Microsoft and its partners have the building blocks and expertise to set your projects up for a successful start.
During the initiation phase, Microsoft Office InfoPath can provide the data collection front end that talks to Microsoft BizTalk Server and Microsoft SQL Server on the back end to transfer information to other systems and to retain collected information. InfoPath can enable the portal provisioning process by initiating server-side processes that build a template-based SharePoint workspace. InfoPath also populates this workspace with key Web parts, documents, access rights, and other necessities.
With the help of solutions and technologies from Microsoft and its partners, every professional services project can get off to a great start.
