As we look toward the next market cycle, it’s clear that economic uncertainty will likely be with us for the foreseeable future. This market turbulence is already putting the professional service industry under pressure as clients tighten their budgets and pass those along to service teams.
Client-based organizations will increasingly need to portray stability despite turbulent economic conditions — and the best way to portray stability is to create it from within. In fact, building business resilience is going to be one of the key strategies professional services organizations use to ensure they not only survive the coming market cycle but thrive through any storm.
Building business resilience involves eliminating the wasted time and resources costing businesses in the knowledge industry over $60M each year due to productivity challenges, canceled projects, and employee churn.
We recently published a groundbreaking study on the Dark Matter of Work, which is the work that gets lost in the gaps between systems and solutions that aren't integrated. This workplace complexity is eating into companies’ profits, fueling employee frustration, and leading to increased employee churn.
In professional services organizations, this often involves teams struggling with poor resource management, lack of visibility with clients, overworked consultants, and process inefficiencies. All of these complexities lead to missed deadlines, cost overruns, and unsatisfied clients.
Our research has revealed that the typical struggles professional services teams face are wasting their time, costing their organization money, and diverting their team’s energy from high-level work. In fact, a single worker’s wasted time might run as high as 13 hours each week, costing a company as much as $16K every year. With professional services agencies or departments, that will result in delays in delivering projects to clients, putting contracts and profit in jeopardy.
As we face uncharted waters, that’s not the foundation you need.
Instead, now is the time to shore up your organization by building a business resilience framework that can withstand rocky seas. That means streamlining processes to eliminate the costly effects of the Dark Matter of Work, investing in resource management tools to help you maximize your team’s time, and continuing to deliver timely and impressive results to your clients.
As experts in the field of work management, we know that work management software can help organizations recoup what is typically lost through the Dark Matter of Work. By streamlining processes, consolidating applications in a single platform, and increasing visibility across teams and projects, work management software helps professional service organizations grow revenue, increase the speed of delivery, and elevate the client experience.
To help you build better business resilience for your professional service practice, we’ve rounded up 14 Wrike features, templates, and integrations that will enable you to power through uncertainty.
Key features for building business resilience in professional services:
- Real-time visibility: Wrike’s dynamic project dashboards give project managers instant insight into every aspect of single or multiple projects. Our drag-and-drop interface helps you quickly adjust in real time to avoid burnout and increase ROI with balanced workloads.
- Workflow versatility: Wrike’s industry-leading Custom Item Types (see below) enable users to mirror their team’s business practices and daily task scenarios in their Wrike workspace. That means you can use your team’s preferred terminologies and behaviors, reducing wasted time further.
- Powerful automations: Doing more with less is made possible with Wrike’s automation engine, which works in the background to sync related tasks, reducing errors and tedious activities without requiring you to update other projects and tasks. You can automate approvals, requests, and more to save your entire team valuable time.
Resource management features for PMO teams and organizations:
- Optimized workloads: Assigning and managing workloads has never been easier. Understand team members’ availability, capacity, and strengths at a glance and drag and drop tasks to balance workloads more efficiently.
- Accelerated resource planning: Quickly estimate project resource needs and request job role resources. With Wrike’s resource planning capabilities, you can ensure the highest priority projects have ample coverage with visibility into resource allocation across your whole portfolio.
- Clear budgeting: Weathering upcoming uncertainty will put pressure on budgets. Wrike’s budgeting tools will be critical in helping you accurately determine project budgets and margins. As team members track time spent on projects, you can monitor budget spend in real time to keep projects profitable.
Pre-built templates:
- Contract management template: Our contract management template allows you to track progress, expedite approvals, speed up renewals, and view each contract’s current stage at a glance. Wrike also gives you instant visibility into the phases of the contract signing/management processes, from status updates to schedules to key terms and conditions.
- Professional services management: Wrike makes collaboration across distributed teams and stakeholders easy with our professional services management template. Custom statuses configured for approval make the status of work clear to everyone, while the proofing and approvals tool gives teams the ability to visually mark up images and videos.
- Work requests: Streamlining intake is critical for your team to recoup lost time. The work requests template can be customized to ensure all key details are included, helping you gauge task requirements and allocate staff resources accordingly. Wrike’s work request form template collates multiple requests into a central hub, making it easier to view, understand, assign, and manage each task.
Built-in integrations for professional service teams:
- File storage integrations: Whether you prefer to store files in Google Drive, Microsoft Sharepoint, or a range of other applications, you can manage that process in Wrike to save time and energy. For example, Wrike’s integration with SharePoint allows you to attach SharePoint files and folders to Wrike so you can enjoy integrated file sharing and consistent collaboration on essential resources.
- Email integrations: You can manage work coming from email more effectively by creating tasks directly from emails with Wrike’s email integrations. Alternatively, you can bring Wrike into Outlook or Gmail so you can work the way you want to and increase productivity.
Helpful tools on Wrike’s ROI
As you strive to maximize resources and achieve more with less, determining the ROI of your work management software is more important than ever. These tools will help you understand the ROI of Wrike.
- Try our Wrike savings calculator
- How Wrike customers save time, money, and increase productivity
- Learn four ways to measure the ROI of work management tools
With this set of resources, you’ll be ready to protect your organization from market uncertainty by creating a strong business resilience framework.
Start your Wrike free trial or request a free demo to see how Wrike can help you streamline, strengthen, and thrive.
