The company currently has 900 people using the software, and by taking more time to carefully document how work assignments are handled, Fink-Jensen says the problems have been straightened out. The software is now proving valuable to the business, he says, primarily because it allows the company to bill for more hours and lets managers utilize their workforce more efficiently. But it took a year to get it straight, Fink-Jensen says, and warns other CIOs to spend more time on training than they think they will need.

If at First You Don’t Succeed...

Scott Kitlinski, CIO of ePresence, a professional services company, echoes Fink-Jensen in saying that a big problem with PSA software is getting people to use it. When Kitlinski joined ePresence two years ago, the company was undergoing a dramatic change. It had been known as Banyan Worldwide and was purely a product company (it made and sold a networking operating system and directory product). As ePresence, it was transitioning itself from a product company into a services organization that provided e-business consulting. But in its new configuration, the software applications it was using didn’t allow the company to create workflow reports and merge new clients into the business. Kitlinski decided that PSA software would be ideal for the Westborough, Mass.-based company’s new focus. He spearheaded a group that chose Evolve PSA software, and in February 2000, he started the implementation. A few months later, however, a major problem became apparent: People weren’t using the software.

To begin with, salespeople weren’t entering data, Kitlinski says. "The simple process of getting salespeople to share pertinent information about clients was a pretty big change because they were used to the idea that they owned the customer."

It wasn’t only salespeople who weren’t using the software though. Resource managers?those in charge of determining what resources are available for projects at the company?weren’t using it either. Because of that it was difficult for other managers to know which workers were available for projects. Workers were either underutilized or misutilized, says Kitlinski, a potentially serious problem in a consulting business.

"All you really have in a consulting business are people and their experience, and if they’re not being utilized properly, then your profitability suffers," he notes.

EPresence spent months trying to get its employees to use the Evolve software. And in the midst of the implementation, the software was revised in a way that made it even more difficult to use; the upgraded version, for instance, no longer allowed its users to get an overview of all the lines of business at once, Kitlinski says.