Business Challenges

The Challenges

As pressure increases to deliver high-quality service to clients more quickly and at lower costs, professional services firms face many challenges:

Coping with rapid content growth: Inefficient use of time. Spending time searching for, sifting through, organizing, and managing information takes away from productive time teams could use to fine-tune advice and ensure quality of final deliverables.

Improving team collaboration: Teams needs to collaborate effectively. Without suitable tools for collaborating across multiple departments and locations, team members could spend valuable time maintaining accurate versions of documents, arranging and holding meetings, and waiting for content during lags in workflow or bottlenecks in review cycles.

Removing obstacles to mobile worker productivity: Remote worker productivity may be limited by firewalls and poor connectivity. Many professional services teams have adopted team sites to collaborate within the corporate firewall, but still use e-mail and the telephone to work with team members and clients outside the firewall. Real-time collaboration across firewalls via e-mail is limited by lack of version control, difficulty connecting, and the absence of accountability tracking. These limitations not only reduce individual productivity, but they also hamper team collaboration, slow down progress on deliverables, and disrupt project schedules.

Giving clients visibility into projects: Keep the client in the loop. Very often clients have little or no visibility into the status of project deliverables and tasks, which reduces client satisfaction and requires teams to spend more time reporting this information to clients.

Addressing inefficient, cumbersome reporting on projects: Internal project status reporting is often labor-intensive and time-consuming due to the lack of adequate workflow processes and the automation of routine tasks

Managing risk and compliance: Professional services-related decisions and documents are subject to a heightened risk of litigation and damaged reputation stemming from the delivery of flawed advice or noncompliance with industry regulations. New regulations have increased the risks of transferring and storing sensitive client data, increasing the need for firms to provide data assurance.