When Is It Time To Automate Your Professional Services Processes?

Automation can streamline business processes and allow your team to work more efficiently.  But automating parts of your business can also be a time-consuming process that can bite into your already busy days. If done correctly, you can save time, effort, and money.  But if done incorrectly, you can waste time, effort, and money as well as negatively impact your organization to any future automation.

Professional Services Automation (PSA) software is becoming more widely adopted for project-based organizations such as those listed below with the intent to improve workflow efficiencies, provide transparency, real-time access to information, and impact the bottom line.

• Information Technology businesses with IT services departments
• Business Consulting
• Digital Marketing and Communications agencies
• Healthcare Consulting Services
• Architecture, Engineering, and Construction businesses.

So, how do you know what to automate? How do you know if you should automate? Here are a few things to consider:

Start by doing a business process review.  Look for tasks that would be good candidates to automate. A few great examples are:

• Tasks that are repetitive or time-consuming: These are the boring things that have to be done over and over and over. Or those tasks that eat up big parts of the staff’s day and require little imagination.
• Tasks whose output requires accurate data: Manually doing a task, such as data entry, can cause inadvertent errors and lead to rework, and have large adverse downstream effects. Automation can consistently control capturing correct data and accurate calculations.
• Tasks to which automation can add value: Automation can open doors to more complex processes or calculations and can handle more data faster.
• Tasks with a defined set of rules that don’t often change: These are tasks that can be programmed without the need for too many future changes. Tasks that are frequently changing or have too many exceptions might require more time to automate and maintain.

Once you have a list of candidate tasks to automate, you will need to evaluate if these tasks should be automated.

Automations must be configured, developed, and maintained. Consider complexity and time to implement and maintain. Some automations are simplistic and can be done quickly, such as creating a report and running it on a schedule. Some automations are more complex, such as integrating with other systems – for example, a CRM or financial system. These types of automations often require special knowledge and may require re-coding when revising or updating, which could add time to change and cost.

When looking for candidates to automate, think about balance and how much work would be reduced by how much work it would take to create and maintain the automation. Included in these assessments, you should also consider if your team has access to the skills and experience needed to develop and maintain the automations. Striking the right balance will be key.

Now that you have your list of tasks, how do you start?

• Start with defining your requirements. Identify the use case to determine the overall scope of what needs to be done along with the intended result in terms of improvement or efficiency you expect.
• Prioritize based on the most impactful processes – big wins will encourage the adoption of automation.
• Next, get to work on the design. Document what the automation should do step by step.
• Implement your design and, most importantly, test and test again. Come up with a test plan and realistic scenarios and review your output.
• When ready: deploy and reap the benefits of automation.

Automations done correctly will free up time across your organization. Be sure to take advantage of this to improve your business efficiency. Take a look at your process workflows and what your team can do now to add more value.

At Top Step, we can help guide you through your automation journey: from business process reviews to providing the technical expertise to develop and maintain your automations, so that you can save time, effort and money.