"Still, the number 1 reason people buy a PSA solution is to improve time and expense processing."Ī PSA solution will capture all the information. How important is PSA software for professional services? Or what happens is somebody buys your firm. And in this market, what’s happening is if you don’t grow you die. But after you get to 20 or so people in your company it just gets too hard to do everything well to grow. If you have 5 employees, yeah, you can use Excel. "The secret sauce is that everything is information-driven, so if you don’t have the information infrastructure, you’re never going to be able to be successful." It was only a handful of companies that offered a more integrated, unified PSA software that actually covers all the bases. Most of the organizations Dave has encountered still have bonafide PSA solutions, but sort of chose when to stop and end. Others didn’t have invoicing at the backend of their PSA software. Many companies he ran into did not have sales and marketing at the front end, like top PSA solutions currently have with integrated platforms like HubSpot. The point of much of Dave’s PSA research was to describe the features and capabilities that PSA solutions have (and should have). “Bottom line was, I was the PSA guy.” PSA pitfalls He spoke on what PSA was all over the globe, hosting PSA world and other conferences on the topic. And measuring how efficient each solution was.But the real key was, nobody spent as much time researching and writing about this as me.”īy that time, Dave was riding the PSA wave, not for having coined the term, but rather for codifying what it was by: “Everybody called it something different. For example, Gartner called it ‘project portfolio management for services organization’. Multiple analysts from Gartner, Meta, Giga, and more came to Dave and insisted that no, PSA was not a real term. “When that hit, my boss said, ‘Now you’re the world expert on this.’” The birth of the PSA industry In that period, he moonlighted as a die-hard researcher, an Indiana Jones of PSA if you will, and published a 90-page report on the topic. “I knew there was more to it than one, two, three small companies out there.”įor the next 6 months, Dave worked on gathering even more data, researching even more PSA organizations - in his spare time, of course he still had to show up as an analyst from 9 to 5. They loved it!”ĭave told management at Aberdeen that he’d seen enough interest from enough different kinds of companies across the globe for the PSA industry to have legs. “All the sudden, companies from all over the world started contacting me about this. The reaction to Dave’s white paper was in a word, enthusiastic. So when it comes to PSA solutions, Dave didn’t invent the concept, but rather found out what other people were actually doing and put it all together in a cohesive way, listed out features in the first PSA white paper. “They just didn’t have the unifying term,” echoes Dave.Īnd most of the PSA providers Dave found at that time were small vendors, the type he says love to come to analysts first to get some proof. So, he was eager and excited when he got the OK to do a ton of research and write a white paper on PSA software.ĭuring his deep dive into the PSA universe (mind you, no one was using that term yet), Dave stumbled into other companies that were doing something similar to that original solution that had been passed across his desk.ĪKA companies were doing PSA they just didn’t know it yet. While Dave’s day job was still as a research analyst, his background was in engineering-īut the man LOVES research. We sat down with Dave to talk about the birth of the PSA industry as we know it now, current market trends, and what makes a PSA solution truly valuable for businesses.ĭave discovers and codifies the PSA market And what was out there was mysterious and would require some detective work. In the late 90s, there just wasn’t a lot out there. “Nobody I know uses a solution like that.” The original company who came to Aberdeen had created a groundbreaking solution that helped manage projects and services, time and expense tracking, etc.ĭave asserted to the Head of Research at Aberdeen at the time. In late 1997, a Silicon Valley company came to the Aberdeen Group in Boston with a concept called PSA ( Professional Services Automation).Ī few principles at Aberdeen brought PSA to one of their top analysts, Dave Hofferberth, since he was responsible for the professional services sector, with organizations like Deloitte and more as big-name clients.ĭave was astounded by what he uncovered in his research and knew that the PSA concept was marketable.
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