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This is very manageable if you are a few consultants, but when you run complex projects, with many professionals required at different stages, most firms opt for a fully integrated Professional Services Automation System. A system like this can be the difference between firms growing and firms staying still. Small efficiency gains can result in big profits.
The global research organisation, Service Performance Insight (SPI), backs this up. Data from their 2016 report: PS Maturity Benchmark, taken from 257 organisations (minimum of 100 employees, average employee size 1,315) showed that companies with a Professional Service Automation Solution achieved 26% more profits than those that didn’t. When this was combined with a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Solution profits increased by 44% compared to those professional service organisations with neither.
We at The CRM Team love to help companies increase their profits. We sell a Professional Service Automation Solution built by Microsoft, called Project Service. It’s a complete system for project sales, resourcing, delivery and billing. We love it. See if it could help you increase your profitability by watching the two-minute overview video above.
You also might like to read our article looking at its features.
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Waterfall relies heavily on initial requirements. However, if these requirements aren’t documented precisely, or there was a misunderstanding around the detail of what the customer wanted, it makes things very difficult. Not so with Agile – requirements are checked and confirmed throughout the project.
Once a step has been completed in Waterfall, it’s difficult to go back and make changes. In contrast, Agile builds a working version of the whole project (an MVP) so the customer can shape how it’s built. Seeing a working version early on in the project allows the customer to say ‘I like this, but I don’t like that’, and so shape the product according to their requirements. This is harder to do with Waterfall because the customer has to outline all their preferences upfront, without seeing a working version.
With Waterfall, the product is mainly tested at the end of the project. If the customer’s needs weren’t captured well initially or they have changed since the start of the project, testing may come too late in the cycle to make big adjustments. The customer then has to find extra budget to get the product they now need. With Agile, testing happens regularly through the whole process, so the customer periodically checks that the product is what they envisioned. This also makes it more likely that the project will finish on time, and on budget.
Waterfall isn’t geared to take into account a customer’s evolving needs. If business processes change during the project Waterfall isn’t set up to adapt to this. Often a client feels locked into a project that no longer meets the current business need. In contrast, Agile not only has the ability to adapt to changing needs, but it expects them and plans for them.
Agile sees the customer as part of the implementation team and includes them at each part of the process. In contrast, Waterfall tends to spend a lot of time with the customer at the start, trying to document all the perceived requirements. But once this has happened, the implementation team usually take over.
Want to find out more? See our approach to CRM implementation.
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When people get more freaked out about being separated from their phone than their cash you know a paradigm shift has occurred.
Here’s the rub: like Yellow Cabs, your company may be late in embracing digital transformation – but your customer’s aren’t. They’ve already digital and they’re looking for businesses who understand how they operate and who talk their language.
Here’s another example: My business partner recently took his wife away for a long weekend. He went all out. Do you know where he stayed? In an AirBnB. He booked his beautiful, luxurious getaway through an app on his phone. The Marriott or Hilton didn’t get a look in.
Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, who’s carried out his own digital transformation, says this:
Engaging your customers… empowering your employees… optimizing your operations… reinventing your business models – this is nothing new. Every great business leader in history has been on top of these. The difference nowadays is that the pace of technological advance is so great that if you don’t keep up you can quickly become a dinosaur – and you won’t even know it until it’s too late. Save & Exit
“Organizations must embrace a digital culture now or be embarrassed by it later.”
How is your industry doing in the realm of digital transformation? Could your industry be the next one to be disrupted by a tech-savvy start-up?
Last year, Accenture Interactive commissioned a Forrester survey of 396 organisations (minimum 1000 employees or more). They found:
Taken from ‘Digital Transformation in the Age of the Customer’
So. You’re aware of the threat/opportunity. What should you do?
The first thing you need to do is take Braden Kelly’s advice:
“You must look at your business and your industry in the same way that a digital native startup will if they seek to attack you and steal your market.”
Put yourself in the shoes of your customer. What aspect of their interaction with you feels old fashioned or clumsy? What are better ways of doing this? If you were a start-up and looking at things from a fresh perspective, what would you do to disrupt the industry?
For the Huffington Post, an online newspaper founded in 2005, that meant using the web, rather than print, to take on the big newspapers of the day. It sounds straight-forward, but HuffPost has also embraced marketing automation technology and has a highly-developed social media strategy.
But in doing so, it’s been successful. In 2011 it was acquired by AOL for $315m. In March 2016, the British national newspaper The Independent followed it’s lead and also became an online-only newspaper – halting its print run, that at its peak, had a daily production of 97,000 newspapers. The newspaper industry is in a fast-paced digital transformation.
A look at what’s possible
You might be saying ‘this is great, but I don’t actually know what is possible in my industry?’ This is understandable, but in the digital age, it’s become the job of every business leader to be familiar with the latest technology trends. It might give you just the advantage you need over your competitors.
Have a look at what is trending currently:
Beginning the Digital Transformation Journey
Of course, you don’t even need to use these technologies for your company to begin the journey of digital transformation. You need to see a new way of operating and adopt the technology that helps you do that. Technology is simply the tool that you use.
Let’s talk
Whatever your industry, here at The CRM Team we are helping many companies take their first step (or next step) along the digital transformation journey. Whether it’s as simple taking your sales team off Excel, or more complex projects, such bringing consistency with the way you engage with your customer over the four customer touch points, we can help. And of course, we’re also geared up to help you use some of the trending tech such as IoT, Machine Learning, Integrated business apps, bots etc.
What opportunity will digital transformation create for your business?
What risks does it pose?
We’d love to assist you to take your next step. And in a digital world, it doesn’t matter where you are based. Why not arrange a conversation about it today?
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Since then we’ve learnt 3 fascinating facts about the deal:
And the deal is still making waves!
Salesforce’s CEO, Marc Benioff, is obviously rattled. After a period of collaboration and partnership, he has now declared the rivalry with Microsoft is back on. His words are defiant, but it doesn’t look great for the CRM-focused company. Microsoft’s new combined cloud CRM/ERP offering, Dynamics 365, with LinkedIn’s mighty Sales Navigator is going to be a potent combination and a big worry for them. This was a big win for Microsoft and LinkedIn. Salesforce.com lost out – big time.
But it would be unfair to make this a deal about Dynamics CRM vs Salesforce.com. It was much bigger than that. And both Microsoft and LinkedIn know this. You can’t box the 10,000 strong, 433 million member, professional network megalith as a simple CRM add-on. Jeff Weiner, who remains as LinkedIn CEO, said that Microsoft gives LinkedIn “advantages most companies can only dream of leveraging”. That’s got to hurt, Marc.
Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, was also very excited about the deal:
‘[it] brings together the world’s leading professional cloud with the world’s leading professional network’
We agree. With a combined reach of 1.5 billion+ people (Microsoft’s customer base and LinkedIn’s membership), the possibilities are staggering.
“Think about it: How people find jobs, build skills, sell, market and get work done and ultimately find success requires a connected professional world.”
Microsoft already helps over 1.2 billion people become more productive through the Microsoft Office suite. Imagine integrating LinkedIn with this. LinkedIn’s reach increases dramatically, and Office’s usefulness gets better and better. Nadella has stated that Microsoft wants to integrate the LinkedIn data with their artificial intelligent assistant Cortana. As Nadella said, “Imagine walking into a meeting and Cortana tells you about people you are meeting and what you need to know about them”.
‘not pressured to compromise on long-term investment… or hamstrung in the way we can reward and acquire new talent due to stock price concerns’.
Weiner predicts that through combining with Microsoft they’ll now be able to innovate and disrupt in some of the following areas:
“the corporate directory, company news dissemination, collaboration, productivity tools, distribution of business intelligence and employee voice…”
Prepare for more creativity and innovation from LinkedIn.
And the timing is great.
Digital Transformation is going to be a huge thing for companies in 2017 and much of this will result in big growth for cloud computing (read: Saas, PaaS and Iaas).
The SaaS (Software as a Service) market is growing rapidly (33% growth last quarter) and there is plenty of scope for Microsoft | LinkedIn to dominate here.
When it comes to IaaS and PaaS (Infrastructure/Platform as a service), Microsoft are already positioned well here, second behind Amazon, but ahead of Google and IBM. If, as predicted, LinkedIn moves its hosting to Microsoft’s Cloud (Azure) then that will bolster Azure even further.
But the Microsoft | LinkedIn deal is not just a strategic move to stop Amazon getting LinkedIn’s business. What Microsoft and LinkedIn realise is that currently their offerings and customer base are quite different. Place them all on one platform and the combined graph is eye-watering for developers:
Who can compete with that?
This deal is a great move for both Microsoft and LinkedIn and it’s going to shake up many industries. There should be lots of companies having sleepless nights – for a good while to come.
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That’s how much companies around the world threw away on IT projects. We’re talking ZERO return on their hefty investments.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
There’s a secret that all successful companies know: Early User Testing.
The old model of ‘Collect – Build – Test’ is dead. No matter how good you are at business strategy, if only let your users in at the end you’re carrying huge risk.
Michael McWatters, UX architect at TED, puts it this way:
“Even the best teams can’t predict every possible pitfall.”
Companies like Uber and AirBnB get this. They ship early and often. By doing this they get crucial feedback from their end-users. The product is shaped so that it genuinely meets a need, mitigating their risk.
It costs 30-100 times more to fix a problem after a project has finished than during it. So this approach makes financial sense as well.
Dr. Susan Weinschenk, Chief of UX Strategy at Human Factors International, said business applications need to do three things well:
The only way of being sure about the first two is to get real user feedback.
But doesn’t Quality Assurance testing do this?
“You might think you’ve addressed every flaw in your design, but until you get user feedback, you won’t know how people really use and perceive what you’ve created.”
Without involving end-users, a business app can pass QA testing but fail on the following:
Fixing these problems after deployment has happened is a frustrating and costly exercise. The cost-effective solution is to get the end users in early.
But how do you do that when the solution isn’t fully deployed?
The way to do get end users in early is to use an iterative deployment process. You produce a working version early (called a minimal viable product) and then run cycles of test and improve, test and improve etc. Depending on the project, it should take days to just a few weeks to get an MVP going. As soon as this is ready you get the end users in to test it and using their feedback you run the next iteration cycle and present again.
Over a three-month deployment, if the iteration cycle is three weeks, the end users would have experienced a version of the application at least four times. With their input, it would have gotten better and better each time.
This process is becoming the standard way to do deployments. Because it gives the customer such flexibility it is aptly named Agile.
We love it and can’t imagine doing deployments any other way.
Our customers get what they want and we get the satisfaction of adding genuine business value to the companies we serve.
Don’t waste money deploying an IT solution that doesn’t suit your users – get them in early. Your users are key.
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