Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Choosing professional services automation (PSA) software is like shopping for a car. You want a model that fits your needs and budget, but you don't want to sacrifice features. It wouldn't make sense for a family of six to buy a two-seater sports car, right? The same goes for PSA software. You must understand your organization’s needs and evaluate the features and functionalities of each product to make the right selection. Here are our tips for choosing the best PSA software for your business.

Let’s be honest: professional service agreements (PSAs) can be difficult to read, and they’re even harder to write. But if you work in the creative industry or the knowledge economy, you’ll probably work with a business or individual providing professional services. There are around 910,000 professional services firms in the United States alone, employing some 9.5 million professionals.

Accurate, streamlined billing processes are absolutely essential for professional service providers. It’s how your business generates revenue, tracks payments, and maintains cash flow. But too often, businesses rely on manual processes that are time-consuming, prone to errors, and difficult to keep up with, risking unbilled hours, frustrated clients, and decreased profit margins.

The whirlwind of to-dos, deadlines, and don’t-forgets of project management can challenge even the most experienced project manager. That's why having the right project management tools in your arsenal is crucial for staying organized and on top of tasks. Project management trackers help you keep tabs on all the moving parts of a project, like assigning tasks, monitoring progress and deadlines, and tracking expenses.

Ever wondered why some projects seem to glide effortlessly to success, while others seem to hit every bump in the road? The answer might lie in the power of benchmarking. As the legendary management consultant Peter Drucker once said: “What a business needs most for its decisions — especially its strategic ones — is data about what goes on outside it. Only outside a business are there results, opportunities, and threats.”

Modern project management is more than a series of boxes to check — it’s about leveraging data and analytics to make smarter decisions, track progress, and improve performance. Project management analytics and metrics create a powerful, data-driven toolkit for project managers to accurately track progress, evaluate performance, and guide decision-making.

Like parents monitoring their kids’ whereabouts to keep them out of trouble, project managers monitor performance metrics to make sure their projects stay on track. With the wealth of data available today, however, trying to keep up with all of it can sometimes feel like drinking from a firehose. If you want your data to yield beneficial insights, it’s important to hone in on the KPIs and operational metrics that impact project and agency performance the most.

Simon Severino, a business strategy coach, has a 90-day plan for when she coaches teams on project management: “What we do in 90 days is — month one, we free up 10 to 14 hours of their time by better organizing, better processes.” This is the power of project management for ad agencies. Done right (and using the right tools), your agency can streamline processes to deliver high quality deliverables in less time. But what do the “right tools” look like?

Has your agency grown in the past few years, despite the numerous disruptions we’ve been through? If so, you’re not alone. Marketing as an industry is still growing fast. There are 54% more agencies today than five years ago, and the average staff size has grown at the same time. If you’ve enjoyed some of this growth, then it’s possible you’ve outgrown your current agency pricing model.