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Positive Change Group Eradicates 29% Cost Overrun Rate and Drives Global Scale with Certinia PSA
By shifting from rigid finance tools to a user-first, Salesforce-native operational standard, the global advisory agency successfully reclaimed lost billable hours, protected project margins, and reversed a severe consultant burnout cycle.
Summary
Positive Change Group modernized its global stakeholder engagement operations by replacing restrictive, finance-centric project tools with Certinia Professional Services Cloud. This user-centric transition empowered front-line delivery teams to co-create a "self-policing" architecture, eliminating severe revenue leakage and establishing total visibility across the project lifecycle.
Today, the agency enjoys unified financial control, optimized utilization tracking, and a scalable operational backbone ready for future expansion.
Bio
Positive Change Group is a leading global stakeholder advisory and engagement agency that partners with ambitious organizations to drive transformation across corporate reporting, ESG, sustainability, and stakeholder engagement. Operating through four specialist corporate entities, including People Made and its flagship entity Black Sun Global, the group supports a highly distributed network of consultants.
Company Size
Small (250+ employees)
Results
These metrics reflect sustainable operational improvements across the agency's global footprint.
Business Challenges
Legacy system constraints and operational friction blocked multi-entity scaling and eroded project profitability.
With billable resources spread across the UK and US, Positive Change Group struggled to maintain consistent group-wide project management operations. The primary operational bottleneck stemmed from a rigid project administration environment that favored finance over delivery specialists.
- Severe Revenue Leakage: Millions of uncaptured and unrecovered client billable hours were permanently lost due to the lack of an intuitive, low-friction time-tracking tool.
- Margin Erosion: Fixed-price projects suffered from an estimated 29% in cost overruns because leadership lacked real-time visibility and operational steering across the project lifecycle.
- High Consultant Attrition: A total absence of centralized scheduling data led to unfair utilization, severe consultant burnout, and an unsustainable 30% staff attrition rate.
- Siloed Visibility: Leadership and project delivery managers lacked real-time reporting capabilities, forcing finance into a reactive posture instead of proactive operational forecasting.
- Administrative Avoidance: Because the legacy architecture was viewed as a painful administrative burden, project teams routinely avoided entering data into the system.
This compounding operational friction forced leadership to recognize that their existing finance-centric model was completely unsustainable for global growth.
"We were previously hindered by a rigid finance tool that delivery teams viewed as an administrative burden. By flipping the telescope to a user-centric design, we’ve empowered our teams to own the data, creating a self-policing process that ensures accuracy. This shift has not only reclaimed billable hours and profitability but has provided us with the scalable operational backbone needed for sustainable, global growth."
The Solution for Positive Change Group
Transitioning to a unified, Salesforce-native PSA tool to drive enterprise operational scalability.
Positive Change Group achieved rapid deployment by intentionally excluding internal finance and commercial teams from early design calls, prioritizing front-line delivery buy-in instead. Delivery teams co-created the enterprise PSA software configuration directly with implementation specialists to ensure high user adoption.
Automated Lead-to-Project Scoping
Project records are now automatically generated the moment opportunities hit Closed-Won within Certinia salesforce environments, seamlessly linking Statement of Work templates and supplier quotes to live project plans. This immediate automation prevents the under-scoping of complex consulting engagements right from the start.
Collaborative Resource & Time Optimization
The professional services automation software introduced built-in timers and simplified task entry that successfully minimized daily time-tracking friction for consulting teams. Resource management software capabilities allow project leaders to allocate staff based on precise skills, availability, and cost metrics. Managers can even forecast resource needs during the early opportunity stage, managing their UK-based consulting teams and North American resources effectively to prevent burnout.
Live Project Oversight & Client Portals
Real-time dashboards allow Project Managers to monitor live project health, variance, plan-versus-actuals, and financial margins while utilizing what-if modeling to test downstream impacts. Furthermore, clients can securely view project progress and live Gantt charts through a dedicated portal, entirely eliminating the need for offline spreadsheet updates.
AI Readiness & Lean Governance
Standardizing on professional services automation software allowed the group to scale a lean, centralized PMO managed by a single administrator across all four entities. With a unified operational data foundation now secured, the agency is perfectly positioned to integrate Veda generative ai professional services to automate repetitive administrative tasks.
Business Impact
The agency successfully reclaimed previously uncaptured billable hours and drastically reduced unbilled time by deploying an intuitive interface that staff enjoy using.
The finance department now receives clean, real-time commercial KPIs as a natural byproduct of daily project delivery, providing instant margin and revenue-per-hour metrics.
Real-time visibility into utilization and task-level workloads allowed management to address burnout head-on, driving a measurable reduction in their historical 30% attrition rate.
By unifying all four operating entities onto a single, best-practice platform, Positive Change Group established the strict compliance and operational efficiency required for future strategic investment and global expansion.
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