Strategies Required for Services Success in 2023 and Beyond: Eliminate or Replace Outdated Tools and Systems

Challenges, Trends & Best Practices From Our Recent Webinar With TSIA

Below is the third and final blog of the series covering the key strategies required for professional services to thrive in 2023. Three key strategies were discussed in Kantata’s most recent webinar with TSIA, where TSIA’s VP of Technology Services, John Ragsdale, sat down with Kantata’s VP of Global Advisory Services, Uriah Hakala, to discuss what can be done to set professional services organizations up for not only 2023 but for years to come. 

The blog below discusses the third opportunity outlined in the webinar — eliminating or replacing outdated tools and systems and investing in the future of professional services automation (PSA) — with three action items for business leaders to put into practice as they head into the new year. To read the first blog of the series, which covers doubling-down on customer success, click here. To read the second blog of the series, which covers building a stable bench of contractors, click here. If you’d like to dive deeper into the topic discussed below, follow this link to watch the entire webinar. 

Strategy #3: Eliminate or Replace Outdated Tools and Systems

As mentioned in previous entries in this blog series, the expectations of workers are changing while the project models they use are also changing. So what exactly is happening to the tools that have historically been used to deliver these projects? John Ragsdale dives into the concept that as more businesses increasingly shift towards repeatable, fixed price projects and even value-based offers that include the purchase of credits, legacy technology may not be the best fit for supporting professional services going forward. 

According to John, “The way we’re selling projects is changing. There is a big push towards moving to renewable service offers where customers are buying credits or points that they’re able to leverage against a service catalog of value-based offers. That is involving a lot of changes to the tech stack.”

John uses billing and ERP systems as an example: “When you start moving to subscriptions, we know a lot of companies are having to bring in a new billing system or ERP system because they’re old legacy system can’t handle subscriptions, and definitely getting into the subscription billing for services and points or credit is going to really be problematic if you’ve got a billing system or an ERP system that’s more than five years old.”

A similar principle applies to professional services automation (PSA) solutions: “We know that a lot of PSA systems were purchased primarily to do custom, pay-as-you-go, T&E projects, but when we think about these fixed price, repeatable projects, when we think about a catalog of value-added services, these are very different kinds of projects, very likely a legacy PSA system is not going to have the flexibility to support that.”

TSIA data shared on the webinar reinforces this shift, as businesses look for more from their investment in PSA. According to TSIA’s 2021 PS Tech Stack Survey, 83% of businesses surveyed have a PSA solution in place already. But more than half of businesses are shopping for a new solution, meaning that a significant amount of PSA users are reevaluating their investment and looking for capabilities that align with new ways of doing business. 

Uriah Hakala breaks down how Kantata’s advisory team works with businesses that are on that journey and wondering whether the limitations they are facing are due to the technology they’re using, the way they’re using it, or a combination of the two. “The way we try to dig into that is to step back and think about ‘How do you actually run your business?’, Uriah says. “Leave the technology out of it for a while and just think about it this way, are you still running your consulting business the way that you did 20 or 30 years ago? Is that still right? Or have you evolved that?”

Here are some other questions businesses can ask as they investigate whether they are using outdated tools and systems to drive professional services:

1. If you have changed how you run your business since putting in systems, are the tools you use built to accommodate your new approach to selling and delivering projects, or do you have to use workarounds to achieve essential use cases?
2. Are the actual users of the system saying the tool is inhibiting them to be successful? Don’t only listen to IT. IT may say that if a system is in place, why replace it? But what are the users saying?
   1. Are they saying it’s taking 10x more time because they have to do tons of manual work to piece together all aspects required to deliver the project?
   2. Are the tools capable of only 50% of what users actually need?
3. Look at adjacent technologies, not just PSA. Look into packaged offerings that provide a one-stop-shop for all services challenges. What tools can tackle most if not all of these key challenges and processes? 

Learn More

The above blog looks at the final strategy discussed in our recent webinar with TSIA, but John and Uriah’s session dives much deeper into the topic of eliminating or replacing outdated tools and systems and investing in the future of PSA. To learn about more of the challenges and trends to expect in the services industry in 2023 and beyond, as well as action items and best practices on how to solve them, check out the entire webinar recording.