The key project management challenges in the professional services industry

Aarav Singh
3 min readApr 22, 2022

There are several challenges that professional services firms face regularly, as they balance capacity & demand, while predicting client requirements long-term.

Firms face risk-based uncertainties, especially around cost management and margin control, as well as schedule overruns for large-scale projects.

Professional Service Automation

Businesses need access to the top project management software solutions, to streamline operations and improve strategic oversight.

Limited financial and budgeting visibility

Analyzing, reviewing, and mapping the financial lifecycle is key to ensuring consistent cashflow and timely receipts throughout project delivery stages.

A critical challenge within this domain for professional services businesses is the lack of visibility into core processes involved in cashflow approvals and management.

Managers need agile reporting and workflow automation mechanisms to ensure that there is greater control of cost outflows.

Digitization also improves collaboration within the domain of budgeting and financial control, to optimize daily monitoring and drive better visibility through a project health dashboard.

Manual resource management processes

Workflows involving resource utilization and monitoring are traditionally manually initiated and tracked. This leads to delays in communication, while introducing risk of schedule overruns.

There may also be a risk of unavailability of resources for requirement fulfilment, which can add cost and delay projects further.

The right way to optimize this management challenge is to digitize the domain of resource management.

By using an online project management software, teams can monitor, track, and predict resource requirements better. They can also benefit from better productivity and accountability across the portfolio.

Minimal tools for real-time profitability measurement

A key challenge for professional services firms is real-time accessibility of profitability management. Projects are emerging increasingly dynamic, with fluctuations in supply, cost, scheduling, and scope of work.

An integrated solution is necessary to offer clear profitability insights and allow managers to track changes to projects over time.

Additionally, with strategic changes in utilization optimization, cost variables, man hour and digital-driven productivity, real-time profitability oversight is key to business sustainability.

Ineffective execution management solutions

Professional services firms that haven’t digitized project management can experience critical issues with execution control.

Task management, daily reporting, real-time updating, reviews, timesheet management, etc. need to be automated to ensure that they are compliant with enterprise policies.

The right P project management tool empowers managers to gain oversight over workflows, enabling them to make better decisions in real-time. Project processes towards milestone achievement can also be streamlined when digitizing the domain.

In conclusion

Professional services firms face key management challenges across functional domains, requiring increased digitization, better visibility, and deeper clarity on project milestones.

The best project management software solutions allow firms to overcome some of the top challenges and drive greater scalability for handling larger projects.

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