Questionnaire | PS Operations Evaluation

This post explains what to expect during a health check by CLD Partners. As shared in this post, our health checks for Salesforce and Certinia start with an assessment. The assessment is our way of getting a thorough understanding of your current implementation and evaluate the PS operations.

The sample questions below are split into two groups.

• Professional Services Operations
• Business Organization & Processes

The assessment is presented as a questionnaire however its carried out best as a conversation to help us fully understand the problem. A good assessment leads to identifying and selecting the best features to implement to optimize, automate and integrate professional services operations.

Evaluate Professional Services (PS) Operations

Below are key topic areas to think about during a salesforce or certinia health check concerning quoting and professional services automation(PSA). Note: these are sample questions not tailored to a specific engagement. Questions may be added or omitted depending on the scope of the engagement. 

Quoting Services & Delivering Projects

1. Do you quote services in Salesforce? If not, we recommend using a services CPQ instead of spreadsheets so your data is all on the platform and available downstream.
2. Will service delivery change? (because of new resource roles, project timelines, or other reasons)
3. Are there any new products or offerings to add to your price books or catalogs? Does it take into account new features that are available in Salesforce RCA? (Selling Model, etc.)
4. Do you want to change how projects are created or configured?

Billing & Forecasting Services

5. Will you continue to bill projects the same?
6. Do you need to add in billing milestones or handle billing for subscription services?
7. How do you forecast revenue today? Are you able to completely forecast revenue in Salesforce or do current processes require taking data off the platform into spreadsheets?
8. Do you have to defer recognizing revenue until services are performed? (Are you making any changes due to ASC 606)

People & Where You Operate

9. If affected by a merger/acquisition, how many new users need created in your system?
10. Will approval processes change? Have they already changed but the system doesn’t reflect it?
11. Do new users know how to use the solution or do they need training? 
12. Do you need new regions or practices added to your organizational structure for reporting?

Data & In-Flight Projects

13. If affected by a merger/acquisition, does the other company use the same PSA system?
    1. Will you migrate legacy data?
    2. Does any legacy data need translated/transformed?
    3. How will you handle in-flight projects?  
14. Are there any new regulatory or compliance implications that need handled in the system?
15. Do the current permissions, user profiles, and other security settings still make sense?
16. Are reports and dashboards configured with the right filters? Do any fields need added?

Whether you work with us or do this exercise on your own, it’s helpful to consider all aspects of the quote to cash lifecycle even if only fixing one portion of the process.

Consider the Business Organization & Processes

We recommend reviewing the following organization questions during a health check as well. Aspects of theses questions may have been touched on above. Omit and add questions as it makes sense for your use case.

1. Are there any assumptions about the business that need to be revised, for example:
   1. “we only sell this way”
   2. “finance doesn’t need that information” yet finance asks for supplemental invoice information
   3. “the EU handles time off the same as the US” – does it?
2. Are the necessary integrations in place to ensure a full view of your operations?
3. Are processes standard across regions?
4. Do approval processes help or hinder the flow of work (Are they necessary? Need to improve?)
5. Are your users working outside the system and does it make sense if they are? For example:
   1. Is your sales team looking at excel or email to find the latest quote details? (consider an on-platform professional services CPQ)
   2. Are your project managers copying project status and emailing it to clients? (maybe add a project status component to your projects and use Conga)
   3. Does finance routinely ask for more detail for expenses billed to clients? (maybe revise the invoice data or integration to include this detail)

What comes next

After the assessment, our team will analyze what we heard and saw demonstrated. We’ll workshop options internally and prepare recommendations. Then we’ll present to the client team recommendations. We’ll help you visualize alternatives and understand options for process improvement, automation and integration depending on your scenario. We’ll outline the work to be done so you can choose what makes sense for your business at that time.  

We’ve helped many clients turn around a poor imlementation. We’re here to help— contact us.