Using PSA Metrics to Benchmark and Optimize Delivery
Author: Uriah Hakala
In Professional Services, whether as a standalone consulting organization, or a services delivery/implementation team within a software company, measuring and managing the right metrics is essential to stay competitive, profitable, and client centric.
Top-performing organizations focus strongly on metrics such as time-to-value (TTV), profit margin (gross or net), forecasting accuracy, resource capacity/performance, and other real-time Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
The modern Professional Services Automation (PSA) software offers integrated tools that empower firms to benchmark these metrics and transform their delivery models. This blog explores these critical success drivers, demonstrates how PSA software functionality supports them, and highlights practical examples and illustrative visuals for clarity.
Time-to-Value: Accelerate Client Impact with Agile Delivery
What is Time-to-Value?
Time-to-value (TTV) measures how quickly clients start seeing tangible benefits after project kickoff. Reducing TTV improves client satisfaction, strengthens partnerships, and accelerates revenue recognition for your delivery team.
Why does it matter? In my opinion, it gives you a good benchmark for “what good looks like”, in addition to being able to provide your client value as quickly as possible. If you are involved in technology implementations, think about what that means: that your client is able to start realizing the benefits of the technology they’ve purchased. Would they rather be in a situation of seeing that value in 18 months or 3 months? Obviously, the faster the better. But that doesn’t mean speed without any other consideration is the right answer either.
If not considered correctly, focusing solely on TTV can lead to scope creep, disjointed communication with your client, and a lack of thoroughness in requirements gathering and testing.
How Top Firms Win:
- Clear project scoping and kickoff
- Agile delivery with incremental, value-focused milestones
- Early risk identification and issue resolution
- Heavy involvement from client stakeholders throughout the process to validate the process every step of the way
How to Use Technology:
PSA platforms offer robust project planning and agile delivery features that allow firms to define detailed milestones, deliverables, and client approval gates. Integrated collaboration tools keep project teams and clients aligned, reducing delays and scope misunderstandings. Automated alerts help identify risks such as timeline slippage early, enabling proactive corrective action.
Margin Management: Drive Profitability with Real-Time Visibility
Why Margins Matter
Profit margins fuel sustainable growth. While strong revenue is important, knowing you maintain healthy margins ensures your investment in talent and innovation is viable. As a pure-play consulting firm, margin is everything. I appreciate that if you run a services organization within a software company, your profitability may be lower on the list of important items. But these days, everyone needs to think about the bottom line.
It’s simple to do a calculation to determine your profitability, and identify what challenge is driving the right behavior and activities to impact margin in a positive way.
Best Practices for Managing Margins
There are more techniques than this, but here are 3 important ones to consider are:
- Accurate cost tracking
The amount that you invoice your client for is relatively easy to calculate. What is sometimes challenging is determining the cost side of the margin equation. Do you use real cost rates? Blended rates? What about different regions, resource types, etc.? The difference here of what might just seem like a few dollars may have a significant impact on the metrics that impact your bottom line. - Optimizing staff utilization without burnout
When you do all T&M work, your margins are going to be relatively set for work that you deliver with a given resource, and the pressure will always be to “bill more”. You need to carefully consider the other side of that equation, which are the people doing the work, and how you properly balance their utilization without overworking your team. - Value-based pricing and strategic project selection
When you get into pricing models which are not T&M (fixed price, value/outcome-based pricing), your options are much more open. Going back to our first topic, TTV is a huge driver – if you can deliver the same project in a shorter timeframe and less effort but receive the same amount of revenue, why wouldn’t you? This also allows you to play with the resource mix between different cost rates to try and optimize project profitability.
If done poorly, the impacts can be highly detrimental to your business – hidden costs that appear towards the end of a project that drive down margins, inaccurate revenue forecasting and project budgets, and pressure on resources to bill additional hours to make up the difference, which may or may not make sense given the nature of your project work.
How to Use Technology:
PSA software provides real-time financial analytics dashboards, offering visibility into project costs, revenues, and margins at granular levels. Automated time tracking and resource utilization reports help ensure billing accuracy and optimize staff allocation, directly improving margins.
A Customer Success Story Leading to Real-World Impact
Quest, a global IT solutions provider, partnered with Diabsolut to gain better control over its professional services operations. By implementing Certinia PSA, Quest achieved real-time visibility into project performance and resource utilization. This enabled them to improve delivery efficiency, strengthen forecasting, and ensure profitability across engagements.
See how Quest transformed project delivery with PSA
Forecasting Accuracy: Plan with Confidence and Agility
Accuracy and Consistency are Key
Accurate forecasting enables effective capacity planning, reduces bench time, and improves revenue predictability. What happens when you don’t forecast accurately? It leads to increased risk on projects, last-minute changes and poor customer satisfaction with your clients.
Best Practices in Forecasting
- Use data-driven, AI-enhanced forecasting tools to provide real-time metrics allowing for quick action
- Foster collaboration between sales, delivery, and finance teams
- Continuously revise forecasts based on pipeline changes and activity on the ground within your projects
How to Use Technology:
PSA platforms integrate CRM data with resource planning and financials to generate dynamic, AI-powered forecasts covering demand, utilization, and revenue. The platform’s collaboration features ensure cross-team alignment, while constant updates reflect real-time pipeline variations.
Aligning Technology and Change Management
The convergence of advanced analytics, AI, and automation enables professional services firms to move beyond traditional delivery constraints. PSA software helps accelerate this shift, integrating comprehensive project, resource, and financial management into a single platform that fosters agility and transparency, along with access to real-time metrics and data to make smarter decisions.
However, technology alone is insufficient. Firms must cultivate a culture of continuous improvement, data-driven decisions, and responsiveness to client needs to fully realize the potential of these tools.
Change Management is the most critical success factor in the deployment of Professional Services Automation software (and the same could be said for just about any enterprise software solution). It’s the key to moving beyond simply implementing software to truly transforming your business and driving positive outcomes. A PSA software is a powerful enabler in this journey, helping firms benchmark performance, make smarter decisions, and deliver client value faster and more profitably. But only if your business is truly ready to adapt to the change.
Professional services success depends on focusing on the metrics that matter most.
With the right Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution, firms can shorten time-to-value, protect margins, and improve forecasting, while gaining the visibility needed to make smarter, faster decisions.
Diabsolut helps organizations go beyond software implementation to achieve lasting transformation. Ready to improve delivery outcomes and profitability?