Professional services firms fail at the joins. Sales promises a start date resourcing cannot meet; delivery burns budget nobody is watching weekly; finance discovers the margin a month after the engagement closed. Each function has a decent system and none of them speak. We connect the chain so the firm behaves like one business.
A services firm sells the time and judgement of its people. Every operational failure — a consultant idle between engagements, a project over-serviced without a conversation, an invoice raised three weeks late — destroys some of that finite asset permanently. Technology's role is to make the asset visible while it can still be redirected. The sub-sectors below each carry a different version of the problem.
Pipeline against practice capacity, engagement economics, and the partner-level visibility that keeps utilisation and quality in tension rather than in conflict.
Blended project and managed service revenue, technical resource planning by skill and certification, and subcontractor management.
Seasonal capacity planning, recurring compliance work alongside advisory, and realization by service line and client.
Multi-phase projects, milestone billing, drawing and document control, and the sub-consultant coordination that determines whether a phase is profitable.
Retainer and project work together, scope management, creative resource scheduling, and the client profitability that scope creep quietly erodes.
Candidate and client pipelines, placement tracking, contractor timesheets and margin per placement across a large, fast-moving book.
The arithmetic is unusually clean. A single point of utilisation across your billable headcount, at your blended rate, is a number you can calculate in a minute — and it is almost always larger than the entire cost of the systems being discussed. Add realization recovered where scope drift is caught in week three rather than at close, time captured at the point of work rather than reconstructed on Friday, and a billing cycle shortened by a fortnight, and the case is usually decided on the first number alone.
The characteristic failure here is not missing systems. It is four adequate systems with nothing joining them.
Opportunities, proposals, win rates and — critically — the resource demand a pipeline implies, which is the input resourcing needs and almost never receives.
Who is available, when, with which skills and certifications, and what they are committed to. Usually a spreadsheet maintained heroically by one person.
Project plans, tasks, budget burn, time and expense capture. The layer where margin is actually determined and, in most firms, observed least frequently.
Invoicing across time and materials, fixed fee and retainer models, revenue recognition, WIP and the profitability analysis by client, project and practice.
Four problems, and the outcome the managing partner or CEO actually wants.
An engagement is won with a start date that assumed availability nobody checked. Delivery scrambles, someone is pulled off another project, and two clients are now slightly unhappy instead of one.
The outcome leaders ask forPipeline visible as resource demand, so resourcing plans against probable work and sales commits to dates the firm can actually meet.Budget burn is reviewed at month end. A project that went wrong in week two is discovered in week six, when the recovery options are all bad and all expensive.
The outcome leaders ask forWeekly burn against budget with a projected final position, so the scope conversation happens while it is still a conversation rather than a concession.Different definitions across practices, time recorded late and approximately, and non-billable work categorised inconsistently. The number is reported monthly and quietly discounted by everyone reading it.
The outcome leaders ask forOne agreed definition, time captured at the point of work, and utilisation reliable enough to base staffing and hiring decisions on.Additional work is absorbed because the relationship matters and nobody wants the conversation. It appears as a realization problem months later, by which time the cause is unrecoverable.
The outcome leaders ask forOut-of-scope work flagged as it is logged, so the commercial conversation happens in week three when the client still remembers asking for it.These four are one problem in four costumes: information arriving after the moment it could have changed anything. Fixing the timing matters far more than adding any new report. Fixing the timing matters far more than adding any new report
We baseline from your existing utilisation and project data, using your definitions, before agreeing any target.
Improvement from resource planning against real pipeline demand
Recovered where scope drift is caught during delivery
Additional recorded hours from capture at the point of work
Faster invoicing and shorter WIP
Project position updated weekly, not at close
Pipeline, resourcing, delivery and margin joined
How to read these: How to read these: the figures above are typical ranges we plan and measure against, not guarantees. In your first engagement we agree the baseline, the target and the measurement method in writing, then report against them.
Most firms start with delivery and resourcing, because that is where the utilisation number lives.
Joining what you are selling to who is available, so commitments are made against real capacity.
Weekly visibility of the position, with scope drift surfaced while it can still be discussed.
The financial close of the loop: capture, invoice, recognise and analyse.
Implementation, extension, support and integration around Project Operations — the application built precisely for this shape of business.
Environment design, data migration, configuration, testing and go-live for the Dynamics 365 applications your operation actually needs — to a fixed price and a fixed date. For a services firm that means going live by practice, starting with the one that most wants it, because a reluctant practice will define the rollout's reputation internally.
Where the standard product stops short, we extend it with model-driven apps, Power Apps, Power Automate flows and custom tables rather than bolting on a separate system. Contract models, rate cards, approval thresholds and utilisation definitions are configured as data your finance and practice leaders maintain themselves.
Managed application support after go-live: a named team, an agreed response time, release management for Microsoft's twice-yearly waves, and a backlog we work through with you. Support aligned to your billing cycle, with extra hands available at month end when time approval and invoicing actually happen.
Connecting Dynamics 365 to the systems you are keeping — with monitored, re-runnable interfaces and a documented contract for every field that moves. Connections to your accounting system, payroll, expense tools and any practice-specific delivery platforms, so a single time entry serves billing, payroll and utilisation.
Time capture is the make-or-break design decision. If entering time takes longer than a couple of minutes a day, it will be reconstructed on Friday and every downstream number — utilisation, realization, project margin, revenue recognition — will be built on an approximation.
Project Operations carries most of the weight here. These are the pieces around it.
Purpose-built for services. Opportunity to project continuity, resource requests and fulfilment against real availability, task and budget tracking, time and expense, and billing across time and materials, fixed fee and retainer — with revenue recognition handled properly.
Opportunities carrying the skills and dates they will require, so pipeline becomes a resourcing input rather than a separate conversation. Win/loss analysis by practice, service and pursuit team.
Multi-entity, multi-currency financial management with WIP, revenue recognition across contract types, and dimensional reporting by practice, client, partner and service line.
For firms with recurring service alongside project work: SLAs, entitlements, case management and the contract consumption tracking that protects a managed service margin.
Engagement acceptance checklists, risk and independence forms, scope change approvals, and the practice-specific delivery workflows that never fit a standard product.
Time capture is the make-or-break design decision. If entering time takes longer than a couple of minutes a day, it will be reconstructed on Friday and every downstream number — utilisation, realization, project margin, revenue recognition — will be built on an approximation.
We run a firm like yours, so we start from a position of some humility about how differently each one defines its own numbers.
We follow an engagement from pursuit to final invoice, and interview the people at each hand-off.
We agree the definitions — utilisation, realization, billable — with finance and practice leadership together.
We prototype time capture and resource planning first, and test them with a sceptical practice.
We roll out practice by practice to a fixed price, starting with the most willing.
We measure utilisation, realization and margin against the baseline across at least two quarters.
The definitions conversation is the one firms most want to skip and the one that most reliably determines whether the programme succeeds. Two practices measuring utilisation differently will produce a firm-wide number that means nothing, and no amount of good software repairs that.
We are a professional services firm implementing systems for professional services firms. That symmetry is genuinely useful.
Utilisation, realization, bench management and the awkward conversation about a project that is drifting are our problems too. We are not translating from a manufacturing playbook.
In Teams, in Outlook, on a phone, in under two minutes a day. Everything else in a services system is downstream of whether this one thing works.
A better CRM does not help if resourcing cannot see the pipeline. We work on the joins, because that is where services firms actually lose money.
Weekly burn visibility, scope changes raised as they arise, and a projected final position you can see. It would be difficult to argue for otherwise.
Two illustrative engagements showing the shape of the work.
Three practices each defined utilisation differently and each maintained its own resourcing spreadsheet. The firm-wide number was assembled monthly and trusted by nobody, including the people who produced it.
Fixed-fee projects routinely ran over. The overrun was absorbed to protect the client relationship and surfaced as a realization problem in the quarterly review, long after anything could be done.
Practical pieces on utilisation, delivery and firm economics.
A short calculation that usually settles the investment question faster than any vendor business case.
Read moreWhy weekly burn visibility changes outcomes and monthly reporting only records them.
Read moreWhere time capture should live, and why every reporting problem in a services firm traces back to it.
Read morePick an engagement type and give us a real rate card and project structure. We will build a working demo of pipeline, resourcing, delivery and billing for that engagement, using your definitions, and walk your practice and finance leads through it.
Describe the situation in your own words.
