Practice Performance Management solutions for professional services firms
Practice Performance Management (PPM) solutions built on Microsoft's integrated platform give professionals the business performance management tools necessary to capitalize on the firm's human, intellectual, and client assets. This enables people to focus more on strategies that will lead to sustained business growth. This integrated platform, along with industry-specific solutions from numerous Microsoft partners, creates a strong foundation for an agile business, giving your firm client service leadership and the ability to respond quickly to changing needs and grow in new regions and new business areas.
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Business challenge
A talented, motivated, and productive workforce is at the core of a professional services firm's ability to drive business success and stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace. From maintaining and growing market share to maximizing the capabilities of their employees, firms are challenged to be ever more innovative in their approaches to staffing, management, and competition. From a practice management perspective, key challenges include:
| • | Difficulty in satisfying and retaining high performance service professionals: Rapid shifts in workforce demographics are accompanied by increasingly short job tenures, negating firm investments in recruitment and training. |
| • | Inability to repurpose intellectual capital and know-how from one project to another: Relevant intellectual capital is often difficult to locate, or is in a form that is not easily consumed. |
| • | Low-yield employee-client relationships: Firms are allocating resources inefficiently due to poor assessments of clients' relative profitability, at a time when competition makes it increasingly important to focus on the strongest long-term prospects. |
| • | Fragmented insights preclude effective decision making: Current IT infrastructures do not provide a firm's business decision makers access to the full spectrum of business intelligence necessary to plan and drive business performance. |
Solutions
Microsoft PPM solutions are built on an integrated technology infrastructure that serves the needs of increasingly global professional services firms. Key components of the solutions—including enterprise search, dataflow management, business intelligence, and customer relationship management capabilities—are built on the same fundamental building blocks. This standardized approach gives firms the flexibility to adapt to local needs that may differ by location.
In addition, the integrated platform can easily aggregate information to provide firm and client service leadership with a "big-picture" view of firm operations, while still offering drill-down capabilities to whatever level of detail is required by middle management and client service leaders in the field.
The platform, in concert with specific applications and solutions from Microsoft partners, addresses practice management needs in four strategic areas:
| • | Talent Management: Service line, practice, and human resources leadership can aggregate disparate insights into employee performance data and define more holistic business performance objectives and measures to guide all aspects of talent development and retention. Employee capabilities are matched with firm and client needs; professional career growth is guided by improved evaluation and review metrics; and exceptional employees are cultivated as unique assets within the firm. |
| • | Knowledge Management: Using a common metadata and taxonomy infrastructure across systems, Microsoft simplifies content navigation, delivering a more intuitive and industry-specific search experience and improving the firm's ability to use accumulated intellectual capital to drive innovation. Standardized Knowledge Management workflow processes for submission, review, and selective content publication help transform content into digestible, usable, and shareable knowledge, empowering employees to address a broad range of business challenges. |
| • | Client Relationship Management (CRM): Microsoft tools help firms apply business intelligence to build more effective connections between professionals and clients and drive business performance. Client interactions are analyzed to give the firm a deeper understanding of client needs, improving service delivery and the client experience, increasing loyalty and setting the stage for ongoing positive interactions. |
| • | Practice Management: Microsoft unites reporting, monitoring, analytics, and practice management tools on a single platform, encouraging strategic thinking, enabling cross-departmental employee collaboration, and facilitating execution of strategies that drive sustained business performance. |
Case studies
Read these case studies to learn how professional services firms have benefited from PPM solutions offered by Microsoft and its partners:
Sheppard Mullin
Law firm increases functionality and reduces costs with new intranet.
Getronics
Global IT solution provider uses unified project management platform that reduces internal IT operations costs by 10 percent.
Skanska
Connected systems accelerate solution delivery, reduce IT costs by 40 percent.
WM-Data
IT services consultancy maximizes billable hours with new IT infrastructure.
Business benefits
Microsoft's integrated infrastructure gives people at professional services firms the technology they need to manage business performance through improved service quality, timeliness, and efficiency; build and sustain client connections; recruit, retain, and motivate top talent; enable a mobile workforce; improve compliance; and deliver distinctive client service experiences to stand out in the marketplace. Specific benefits include the ability to:
Better identify and leverage employee capabilities and address needs
Targeted searches of talent pool more easily identify and direct employee capabilities, and active performance planning, evaluation, and review help to drive professional and career growth. When employees feel actively cultivated as unique assets, improved morale increases retention, firm culture speeds recruitment, and cost control improves.
Link client needs with internal teams best able to address them
More informed insights about the firm's workforce, delivered through dashboard-based pipeline reporting and monitoring, helps leaders better identify and leverage employee capabilities to address client needs.
Tailor service offerings to client needs
The ability to integrate event, service history, and financial Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) creates more holistic CRM, giving firms the tools to identify and predict client behavior; anticipate clients' future needs and growth; understand client potential to use a wider array of firm services; and improve the ability to shape services packages that meet client needs while preserving profit margins.
Turn fragmented insights into a global view of shared strategic objectives
With reporting, monitoring, analytics, and practice management tools on a single platform, employees can more easily turn content into insight to inform a global view of shared strategic objectives. They can also more easily share and leverage managerial knowledge and experience across departments to jointly drive business performance.
Make decisions that align with strategic objectives
Dynamic reports and scorecards that synthesize practice management data from a broad range of systems, combined with analytics tools for drill-down analysis of both dynamic and static data sources, enable faster and deeper insight that helps business decision makers to facilitate effective firm-wide execution on strategic objectives.
Overview
Technology
