Review

First Book About PSA Explains What Solutions Can Do For Project-driven Organizations
By Lee Appleyard, Project@works, September 2002

Professional services automation has been likened to the baby alien in a science-fiction flick: Who knows what it is, but it keeps getting bigger. For those who want to put PSA to work but don't feel they have a firm grasp on what it does or how it does it, there is now a book that offers help. Six years in the making, PSA: Optimizing Project & Service Oriented Organizations examines the PSA industry and how companies can implement and benefit from a wide range of rapidly emerging applications. Written by a five-person team of executives at Montreal-based PSA vendor Tenrox, the 25-chapter, 400-page book includes figures, charts, diagrams and workflows that describe PSA elements and concepts through the experiences of veteran project management professionals, IT experts and executives.

Using the PSA lifecycle, ROI calculators, and best practice templates, the authors cover opportunity and resource management, invoicing, purchasing workflows, revenue and cost accounting, timesheet, labor and knowledge management, request and issue tracking, and performance analysis.

The book also addresses the "alphabet soup" issue, explaining variations on a theme such as business process automation (BPA), enterprise service automation (ESA), enterprise service management (ESM), service process optimization (SPO) and service relationship management (SRM). In addition, CRM, HRM, and enterprise accounting are examined in relation to PSA.

"No matter what name is assigned to these applications, if you are an executive or project manager in a services organization, chances are [PSA] can help improve your business process efficiencies," Ted Kemp, principal analyst at Gartner Dataquest writes in the book's introduction. "Anyone interested in learning more about these applications will find this book an excellent resource."

Market necessity was the book's mother of invention, according to lead author Rudolf Melik. "Working in this fast-changing area since its beginning and working with our customers to implement these great solutions, we naturally assumed that this subject had already attracted a wide body of published work to help people navigate among the competing products, vendors, terminology and technology," Melik says. "We were genuinely surprised when we could not find much material available, so we decided to do something to correct this deficiency."

Melik says the book's ultimate goal is "to provide today's project- and service- oriented organizations with the necessary tools to overcome the pressure of maximizing revenues, minimizing project costs, producing more measurable results, improving productivity and increasing customer satisfaction."

The Project Management Institute has asked the book's authors to participate in a four-day seminar at its October 2002 Conference and Symposium in San Antonio, Texas. In addition, PMI chose four papers - chapters from the book - from which to conduct keynote presentations.

For more information, go to www.psabook.com