In the consulting and managed services, you need a PSA. Whether that’s what the vendor calls it is a different matter entirely.

Fred Chagnon
Principal Research Director,
Consulting and IT Managed Service Provider Industry
Info-Tech Research Group

Software selection used to be a lot simpler. Usually you had an incumbent vendor, and you probably also had a good idea who their competitors were in case you ever needed to change. The lines were clear between one solution and another, and the vendors were equally clear about what functions their solution performed.

Fast-forward to today and these stand-alone products are few and far between. Now, ecosystems of overlapping features blur the lines between one software solution and the other, challenging IT leaders and business owners with the need to ensure they don’t duplicate too much functionality in their application portfolio.

In no market is this murkier than in the professional services automation (PSA) software market. This is a market where the top four vendors in SoftwareReviews.com’s emotional footprint and data quadrant reports (Accelo, Avaza, Scoro, and Wrike) don’t even use the term “professional services automation” in any of their marketing. Instead, they self-identify as project management software, as work management software, and even as service provider enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions.

Meanwhile, you have two behemoths like ConnectWise and Kantata, both of whom identify as PSAs, but whose products are targeted so specifically to different industries that they rarely compete head-to-head for the same customer.

All of this and more add up to a very confused buyer – who has to struggle to understand the use case of a PSA to begin with.

What’s not up for debate is that if you operate in professional services as either a consultant or a managed service provider, you need PSA software. In this guide we will clarify what a PSA really does, how to effectively evaluate it, as well as provide some guidance on how to ensure that the implementation of such a solution goes smoothly.

• The success of every professional services and managed services firm relies on the ability to assign the right people to the right work at the right time.
• Despite the criticality of this, many firms are using outdated processes and tools to handle the identification, assignment, and scheduling of resources to deliver work to their customers.
• Professional services automation software streamlines many of these processes, making resource management, among many other challenges, much more streamlined.

• Despite the need for this, one-third of consulting firms and one-quarter of managed services providers (MSPs) still continue to operate without a fully integrated PSA.
• Many of these firms use project management and resource management software to ease the burden of those discrete processes, but these solutions do not have visibility into other aspects of work that put demands on their resources – thereby limiting their value.
• PSAs are often presented by their vendors as integrated front-end software, when truly their value lies in integrating the back-end workflows of tools which may already be in place.

• Understand what a PSA is truly for and the problems it solves in a services-based business.
• Evaluate a PSA based on your primary business model, and based on its ability to integrate with the way you operate.
• Implement the PSA with an understanding that it is a living, breathing piece of infrastructure that will need to change at the speed of business. Ensure the proper resources are in place to effectively implement and operate it accordingly.

Evaluating PSA Software

Implementing PSA Software