Project Management Solutions Provide Big Value-Add to Partners Solving for Business Outcomes

If you’ve made the switch from product sales and one-time services to offering your customers ongoing solutions, odds are you’ve become familiar with favorite project management tools such as Asana, Basecamp or Jira. But just throwing one of those tools into your service offerings as a one-size-fits-all platform doesn’t ensure you’re providing a project management solution that’s truly specific to your clients’ needs. Different products have different benefits and primary use cases. If you want to offer your customers’ businesses—or your own operations—customized solutions, there are a few things to consider first.

A project management (PM) tool helps plan, organize and manage internal resources to reach peak efficiency so your customers can focus on doing business instead of shuffling through emails or spreadsheets to try and get a sense of where they are in a project. The proper PM tool can help ensure projects are delivered on time and give quick and simple visibility into the burn rate of a project’s budget, allowing managers to scale up or down accordingly.

Perhaps most attractive, the right PM platform can really facilitate streamlined communication. Many PM tools have a collaborative feature like chat or a message board, which allows all communication regarding the project to be centralized within the tool, instead of scattered across other tools, like an office messaging application or email.

Before you even consider weaving a PM tool into a customer’s service package, make sure you have a conversation with them to determine if they’re even ready for it, says Jess Cash, a Dallas, Texas-based project manager who works with digital marketing agencies to help them hone processes and ensure they aren’t hemorrhaging money because of inadequate oversight. If they’re still monkeying around with ad hoc ‘processes’ with no real established workflows, a PM tool will be useless to them. These platforms are meant to support existing processes and improve planning and profitability, but they won’t magically create order where there is none to begin with.

Once best practices are in place, it’s time to help your clients evaluate their resource management capabilities.

“Resource management is just figuring out how to use your resources as efficiently as possible. It’s making sure that the right people are working on the right projects or project elements, according to whatever their skills and abilities are,” says Cash. “A good project management tool will have a feature for resource planning. For instance, some have an interactive schedule with a dynamic timeline that’s hugely helpful in evaluating whether the organization or team can take on additional projects.”  

There are a few other key features Cash says you should look for when helping your clients evaluate and select a PM tool:

There aren’t many organizations that wouldn’t benefit from the efficiencies that PM tools offer, says Cash, provided you’ve chosen the right one to fit business needs. That means that if you position it right, it’s a service that you can legitimately sell to virtually all of your clients as a real value add to their businesses.

“So many companies I work with tell me at the start of the engagement that they don’t think they need to invest in a proper project management tool. But when I go through the books and show them how much money they’re essentially throwing away on these ad hoc processes, the numbers speak for themselves.

“Let me be clearer: A project management tool is essential for any company interested in delivering projects on time and within budget. Period”