Caring For Mindsets, Methods, & Metrics Across Industries: Modern PSA’s Role
Let’s say that your IT services company is executing a project for a large financial institution. You would like to finish the project within the cost and time budget. You will watch out for scope changes and aim to bill the extra work.?
On the other hand, if you are a Pharma company and developing a new drug, you would inevitably go the extra distance to make sure that your drug will do well in the market. Often, the extra distance means whatever it takes.?
People’s attitudes depend on the industry and the nature of projects. They value different things and their decision making criteria change accordingly.
A? project to launch a new car is quite different from launching a new drug. Different things need to be managed and tracked in projects from various industries. They involve a variety of methods and need metrics that reflect important parameters. For example, IT companies sell skill hours. Metrics like billing per employee and bench utilisation are important. In EPC companies such metrics are not critical. EPC companies may like to focus on timely completion of milestones and cash flows.
Mindsets, methods, and metrics change as per industry and type of projects. Enterprise software must be tuned accordingly.
Let’s step back a bit and take in a broader cross industry perspective.?
PSA as a category arose from completely new needs of modern businesses that remained unmet by enterprise software solutions developed and matured for product manufacturing. The unmet needs spurred development of functionally focused standalone software packages like CRM, HRMS, timesheets, billing, agile project management, etc.? The mature-but-limited-to-black boxes business software like ERP and standalone solutions deepened functional divides and created data silos. The data silos made it difficult for managers to get validated real-time information.?
PSA platforms were developed to address the above fundamental problem. PSA software makes end-to-end and top-to-bottom data connections through integration of data islands and offers optimised workflows.
PSA software vendors need to align with their customers’ needs.
To understand what is at stake, let me give you an overview.?
Types of Projects
The nature of projects has a large influence on what, how, and why work takes place. It determines what needs to be measured and managed.
Companies working on specific requirements of their clients undertake such external projects. Their focus is on delivering exactly as per scope and budgets. Their goal is billing of time and materials in T&M projects or deliverables in fixed-price contracts. They are sensitive to scope changes.
2. New product development:
Companies building their own products or enhancing existing products undertake such projects e.g. launching a new entry level or luxury segment car in India. They strive to improve their offering even if there is cost or time overruns. Their operating goal is to balance time to market and product’s quality or features.
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3. Internal initiatives:
At times, companies launch internal initiatives aimed at enhancing capacity, improving quality, or cutting costs e.g. building a new manufacturing plant.? People working on such projects are aligned with their organisation’s long term strategy. Their key metrics are ROI and long term benefits.
Mindsets, methods, and metrics in each of the above types of projects also depend on the industry. Therefore, we have a matrix of industries and projects.
Nature of industries
Every industry has its own distinctive needs.?
IT services are primarily focused on time-based billing and resource management. They track billable hours, resource utilisation, and granular profitability.? They often use agile project methodologies.?
The Pharma industry has two distinct areas. Contract Research Organization ( CRO) and product companies like generic drug manufacturers. CROs are similar to IT services but they are additionally focused on experiments and material costs. They must manage experiment outcomes (mini-projects) and sample analyses. Their metrics are experiment success rate, time to completion, and regulatory compliance.
Pharma generics manufacturers develop new drugs using complex processes like molecule selection and patent expiry tracking, market sizing and revenue forecasting, costing and ROI calculations, and document management for dossier filing. They track time to market, regulatory approval success rate, and manufacturing efficiency.
Other industries: Automotive companies need to manage complex supply chains and design projects. EPC companies work on large multi-year projects involving environmental and safety compliance. Project-based manufacturing companies balance custom deliveries with production efficiency while ensuring customer satisfaction.?
To offer great value, PSA vendors need to address the matrix of industries and projects.?
A modern PSA must empower managers to handle their daily tasks through efficient tested yet configurable workflows. PSA eliminates the need for workarounds and spreadsheets.?
Workaround and spreadsheets compound delays, introduce errors, and drain managerial capacity.
Although the underlying principles of projects, solutions, or services oriented businesses remain the same, PSA vendors need to utilise cross-industry learnings and incorporate best practices.?
They must cater to tracking of a variety of industry-specific things like skills inventory in IT companies to experiment tracking in Pharma to projected completion time or project cost in EPC companies. Their solutions should be easily configurable to align with methods used in various industries. They must be? sensitive to differing mindsets and speak their customers’ language.?
I shall delve deeper into how a modern PSA can bring great benefits through a few examples of? the needs of above industry-project combinations.
PSA vendors must provide value by caring for mindsets, methods, and metrics of customers through their offerings.
We shall be happy to share our cross-industry learnings with you and demonstrate how Kytes, a versatile PSA, meets your unique needs.?
Contact us at [email protected] for a demo and more information.