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Consulting and service organisations have an inherent need to provide their services in accordance with their quality management principles. Whether formally or informally, this is true of all such organisations.

At a certain point of scale, or in response to the provision of services to government bodies or large corporations, they will find it necessary to formalise such principles and ultimately to achieve ISO (International Standards Organisation) certification under ISO9001.

Every product believes itself unique in the way it address the needs of its customers.

In the PSA space, people talk about the market being crowded with offerings and if you list out all those products that use the suffix, there are quite a few.

However, if you restrict the list to products that provide support for both project and service desk functionality, the number shrinks dramatically.

But offering this capability is, to our way of thinking, insufficient differentiation.

In any business application, the homepage is a key area of real-estate. It provides an opportunity to inform, alert and communicate, while delivering fast access to work that needs doing.

Harmony has always had a clean and powerful homepage, but as the capability of the system has developed, we realised that there were features we could use to turbo-charge the user experience.

So, welcome to our exciting new user homepage, containing all the information you need at your fingertips, configured by you to save time and improve communication and organisational effectiveness.

Agile methodology is now so firmly entrenched in software development culture that any challenge or deviation from the “Agile Manifesto” is seen as heresy.

And that’s fine, we agree that Agile has its place in delivery of software - we use it internally ourselves.

The challenge comes when the approach is applied to the type of projects generally running in your PSA system; namely customer-driven billable ones.

Why a traffic jam?

Well, this image is more than just a traffic jam. Look closely and you will see many vehicles of different sizes, even a bus, individual scooters and people walking, all going round in circles trying to get somewhere and not doing very well.

This seemed to us a perfect pictorial analogy for a DevPS business.

At HarmonyPSA we have been working hard on Harmony version 4.19, bringing you many new features and fixes. We run through some of the major changes in this article.  You can access the full list of releases and bug fixes by clicking here.

If your business deals with customer queries, complaints or issues, you probably have some sort of help desk software.

If your business provides technical support, whether infrastructure, environmental or software, you will most certainly have a one.

There are dozens of SAAS-based service desk solutions available. It is probably one of the most common software verticals. Solutions are available for a broad range of requirements, with very different levels of sophistication and price disparity to match.

Given such a plethora of choice, why would anyone consider Harmony, which is not a service desk application but a business management solution that has an integral service desk?

Every company needs a CRM. Indeed, it may be the first system a new start-up buys.

CRM systems are great - they allow you to track contacts, record interactions, add opportunities and give them statuses so you have a clear understanding of the potential business the sales team is working on, i.e. the new business pipeline report.

They are easy to use standalone systems that help the sales team organise their work. What could be wrong with that?

One of the common questions we are asked during our sales process is: does Harmony integrate with this or that CRM system? The answer is “No”.

Professional services companies use timesheet systems; they need to know what their staff are working on. Without time recording, how would they know how much to charge each month?

Given that this is the air these companies breathe and the app stores of the world are full to the brim with timesheets systems, it is surprising how many companies we speak to simply cannot get this process right without extensive manual manipulation and post-timesheet editing.

What are the challenges associated with a growing trend in the MSP world: partial technical support, or from a client’s perspective, partial outsourcing of their technology services?

With small businesses it makes sense to pass everything over to an MSP; large organisations will have the scope to employ a full team of technology support staff and keep the problem internal. The challenge comes where a medium-sized organisation retains some technical skills in-house (say desktop support), but hires an MSP for more specialist areas such as networks or security. Where they cannot afford the depth of resource necessary to cover a topic fully, they will outsource that aspect of their internal support to a specialist MSP.