Project Management vs. Professional Services Automation (PSA)
The word “Project Management” is overloaded. It means different things to different people. When looking for a Project Management app there are three categories that fit within the broader “Project Management” space: Task management, Project Management, Professional Services Automation.
These categories are often not competitive but can be complementary, with each providing a layer of capability rather than separate concepts.
The question is knowing what capability is required and what will create unnecessary complexity and administration.
Let’s take a look at these three categories and see how they apply to you:
Task Management
Task Management software aims to provide a simple way to capture, categorize, set-due dates and mark tasks as complete. Task Management applications are for individuals managing their to-do list or a small team tracking actions. They are typically lightweight by design.
Project Management
Project management software provides more capability in planning and executing a well organised and/or prioritised body of work. Project management applications would typically provide a way to build task dependencies, estimate time to complete work, and provide more detailed ways to share project overviews or critical details with customers/clients, contractors or other stakeholders.
As you’ll be working as a team Project Management software will often be collaborative. Collaboration may be internal with the immediate project team, or external to include key stakeholders.
Most project management applications will provide some type of reporting around the progress and success of a project where more capable solutions will even enable you to create your own reports and dashboards too.
Professional Services Automation (PSA)
Professional Services Automation (PSA) software as its name suggests is designed for a professional services business. When managing professional service projects a critical factor is, and usually makes up the largest cost to the project, the ate of the people billing to that project. A critical factor to a professional services business is the profitability of a project. The profitability of a project is affected by the resource assigned to the project. PSA apps will provide workflow and approvals around assigning people to a project and allow those people to log the time they spent on projects to affect project profitability reporting and to enable the customer to be invoiced.
Understand your objective
It is very easy to get buried in feature comparison when evaluating products. To keep yourself focussed bring the evaluation back to the fundamental purpose and problems you face or will face. This is the best way to see which category of solution solves your problem. Try to succinctly capture the single most important improvement you want to make to your business.
What next, explore Taskfeed…
At Taskfeed we focus on a specific area we call Customer Project Management. Taskfeed helps companies manage customer project on Salesforce. When Customer Projects are managed from Salesforce your teams are more on the same page.
To learn more check out our customer stories, watch a 2 min demo, or book a session to see what’s the best approach for your business.
Originally published at www.taskfeedapp.com.
