Professional services organizations face increasing pressures to perform. With a highly skilled and expensive pool of resources, their effective utilization is often the key to profitable performance. With a large number of software tools available, what are the key capabilities that need to be in place? Demand Management Work requests, project estimates and other demand needs to be easily entered into the system. Web based spreadsheets, such as Innate’s, are appropriate. They capture demand profiles for new work and immediately show the skill capacity to take it on. Where the bottlenecks are unacceptable, scenarios are required to help evaluate project scheduling options and re-balance the workload. Scenarios are not only useful for new work, but also as priorities and scope changes occur. Re-balancing is a likely requirement for busy professional services organizations. Planning & Scheduling The appropriate planning tool must be available. Within Innate, you can use Microsoft Project or the Innate web based spreadsheet for detailed planning. For more complex projects, budgets and date constraints can be established initially within Innate and copied to Microsoft Project for top down planning. Multi project reports and milestone tracking are standard requirements.