From Day-One Login to Power User: How One New Consultant Proved Kantata’s Ease of Adoption

When Lois Collins joined Press Ganey as a Principal Consultant, she walked straight into a high-stakes hospital engagement. She wasn’t just learning a new system, she was learning a new organization, new clients, and a new team all at once.

Before Kantata was introduced to Lois, her world looked familiar to many consultants, “Life before Kantata was really all about Post-it notes and Excel spreadsheets.” That approach worked… until it didn’t. As projects grew more complex and stakeholders multiplied, spreadsheets created more anxiety than clarity. And under pressure, even experienced leaders can feel reactive instead of proactive.

At the same time, Press Ganey itself was evolving how it used Kantata. What started as a time-tracking system had become something much bigger: forecasting, resourcing, health reporting, and executive visibility across hundreds of active engagements.

Erika Sparks, Director of Operations, describes that shift in phases, moving from looking backward at time tracking to looking forward at capacity and forecasting, “We started thinking ahead… How are projects going to behave? What’s our capacity going to look like?” 

The stakes were clear. Better structure meant better delivery and better outcomes for clients.

When Lois joined Press Ganey, Erika’s team introduced her to Kantata — the platform the consulting organization uses to manage engagements, resources, and project performance. As Erika explained, part of her team’s role is helping engagement managers learn how to use the platform to coordinate the many moving parts of complex consulting engagements.

With that introduction, Lois began exploring Kantata through Press Ganey’s internal enablement resources and training videos.

She expected to be disappointed. “I assumed it was going to be the software that the corporation had that I was mandated to use… I expected to log in, check the box, and slip right back into my Excel spreadsheet.”

Instead, something different happened.

“Within two to three minutes of logging in, I recognized a very simple, very intuitive interface that held complexity behind it.”

She began exploring — clicking through dashboards, reviewing tasks, and opening files — and quickly realized Kantata wasn’t a compliance tool. It was a framework. “It really helped put structure and order to the chaos… crystallize our goals, identify supporting actions, and execute against a plan.”

Lois had never used a professional services automation (PSA) tool like Kantata before. Her background included Excel, Microsoft Project, and Trello. She laughed when she realized how much time Kantata saved her. “It was frustrating to realize there was software that would actually build a Gantt for me. I hate building them in Excel — it makes me want to say unkind things. Kantata is a great tool.”

While Lois was discovering the platform from a consultant’s perspective, Erika’s team was seeing the broader operational impact. Kantata had become the backbone of how Press Ganey manages projects, people, and financial forecasting across the consulting organization.

And as the platform evolved, so did the value it delivered.

As Erika explained, “Kantata is never happy with the status quo. And I love that because I feel like, as a customer, I’m getting so much more value than what I signed up for at the beginning of my contract year. They listen to their customers.”

Kantata has become the shared system where projects, people, financials, files, and deliverables all lived together. As Erika put it simply: “We use Kantata to run our business — period.”