Qualities of a Highly Effective PSA

Written By Matt Van Vleet and DJ Daugherty

When you’re a services based business that’s designed around managing the flow of people, the PSA software you choose can make a huge difference in not only your day to day, but also where you can go in the future—and how easily you get there. But not all PSA technology is built the same.

Even though every business is unique, there are qualities that every PSA should have and how they line up from a technical perspective to help your business grow and thrive.

Scalable

Your PSA needs to be able to scale and grow when you do. You want a system that can scale both at the cloud level and at the user level to help you as you grow into larger numbers of users, projects, and/or clients. You want a system designed with a flexible, scalable architecture so scaling is already built into it.

Most PSA products out there are designed as a set of internal tools that aren’t scalable. Ogantry’s back end is written on an API that can be used to either customize it to your own needs, or left as-is so you can use our standard interface. So you get built in flexibility to use it to suit your needs and growth.

Cross-Disciplined

Your PSA needs to be able to show your organization’s current reality for various areas of the business all in one place. The ideal PSA enables you to see into multiple perspectives and specialties. You need to be able to align your data between staffing, recruiting, and sales so that those different disciplines can work together to understand where the business is at and will most likely go.

Tying your data together is key to getting your data model correct and understood based on past lessons you’ve learned as a company. Ogantry is built with a solid, proven data model that’s been time-tested and any problems solved by writing code rather than changing the model itself. It’s built to help you understand and gain insights on your whole business, no matter the area.

Traceable & Future Focused

You need a single source of information to see into your past, trace what changed and understand when it changed. The right PSA will give you insights rather than force you to come up with them. Then you can look in one place and make adjustments based on what happened in the past.

And because the current reality changes all the time for services businesses, you also need to be able to check your current reality with what’s coming. An effective PSA should be forward-looking and help you get the necessary insights to predict the future so that you don’t lose out on your people’s costly and valuable time.

Ogantry has effective dating, which allows users to insert data into the database in a way that is almost like a time machine. You can look at your data as if you were looking at it at any given time, for example you can look back and get a snapshot of exactly where you were at 3 months ago as if it was today. While many PSA’s require that you go and hunt down a batch or manually pull together information from the past, Ogantry allows you to actually go back in time and see where you were a month ago on a given day just as easily as you can look at where you’re at today.

Sliceable

Does your PSA enable you to look at different areas of your business? You need to know how you are performing in the market and how different areas of the business are faring. Everyone in the company will usually have a different slice of the data they are interested in. Maybe it’s a region or a certain book of business, type of contract, etc. Choose a system where you can quickly look at slices you want to see via things like tags and filters without getting lost in the system and all its data points.

Ogantry’s tagging feature gives you the ability to create tags. Tagging, similar to hashtags on social media, lets you define different ways you want to slice your data and then quickly and easily look at those slices. You can create as many tags as you want, filter them how you want, and use them how you want.

The Right PSA Helps You Grow

When you’re running a services business where your people are your biggest “resource,” and growth is hugely a matter of knowing where you stand now and what moves to make next, you need software that is built with the right technology to back it up. It needs to support your business rather than constrain it. A PSA that has these 5 qualities enables you to manage your business without spending time reacting only to the past. When you choose the right PSA, you can focus on your business instead of your software.