Globalizing a Professional Services organization can mean many things.  Do you standardize on cost structures and financial rules only or expand standardization to organizational structures, delivery methodologies, service offerings, centralized operations, and so on?  To have a global PS organization means, in short, you are delivering Professional Services from your company around the world.  It does not automatically mean the services delivered in Belgium are the same as those delivered in India or the United States.  However, your customers may have this perception - same company name, same company offerings.  The benefit of being globalized is meeting this customer perception along with making your PS operations more efficient, profitable, and predictable at a local and global level.  Can you deliver the same activity regardless of office location to meet your customer expectations?  This is Stage 0 - Global Thinking and your customers have it even if you or your employees don’t.

What if you want to meet those customer base expectations of consistency and global operations?  It is not an easy feat.  There are many aspects to consider and many internal hurdles you will face as you reach what you will need to define as a true global organization.  The obvious hurdles are time zones, languages, and culture.  I call this Stage 1 - Logistics. Handling these promptly may help you in moving toward the more difficult ones in the future.  The time zone topic is one of my favorites - when you join a global company based in the US, for example, are you automatically signing up to attend meetings from Australia at 11:00 pm simply because that’s normal working hours for the US?  Achieving support at a global level means thinking globally - if you are asking someone to work at 11:00 pm one night, why don’t you sign up for a 3:00 am meeting occasionally to meet the remote office hours?

Stage 2 - Operations is a more measurable approach that tackles financials and infrastructure.  The financial reporting requirements and standards today help take care of this area to some extent.  But what about aligning the regions to compare them on a standard rate scale?  Each region has a pricing structure that it will tolerate so base salaries are adjusted to enable profit.  This establishes different cost rates among your offices.  Offices that have worked independently for years may have different month accounting time periods (full month, last Friday month, etc.) and each country has its own calendar of holidays removing available invoice days from your operational performance equations.  This makes correlation of profitability dependent on the local uniqueness.  How do you compare country performance at a global level?  Setting up a standard cost structure that accounts for local cost allocation will standardize your margin reporting.  Using a PSA tool that handles the country calendars, such as OpenAir, will take care of the available invoice day adjustment of the equations.  Establishing a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) then gives you the ability to compare countries at a relatively similar baseline to determine where the focus on adjustment should occur.  Globalization of infrastructures should not reach beyond tool infrastructure and financial reporting to areas such as organizational structure.  Countries or offices within countries need a level of control within a globalized PS organization to operate according to local laws and local culture.

The next stage, Stage 3 - Best Practices and Methodologies, begins to cross over from internal globalization to your customer base.  In my experience this is the hardest stage of globalization.  What is a best practice at a global level?  What methodology makes sense for your company?  Use your existing resources to help answer this question then do research to ‘fill in the gaps’.  For many companies moving into a globalization effort, their individual offices have been delivering PS engagements for a while and have a lot of experience.  Why not leverage what has already been done?  You will get more adoption from the employees if they know it came from their own efforts.  The difficulty is that your company has employed a lot of smart and visionary people, no doubt.  They will be the audience to help determine which final best practice and methodology they can support - and this is the tricky part.  Everyone has an expert and experts don’t necessarily agree on a single vision.  The real key to success in this area is involvement from your experts but allowing flexibility for local customizations.  Have local offices identify champions to work with virtual teams and define the final assets.  Then get the word out!  Engage supporting departments in your company that can help with the adoption phase among the offices - marketing and sales support are invaluable in gaining momentum since they are getting the word out internally and externally!  There are many other challenges in this stage that could take up another few articles (or an entire book!) but we’ll have to leave this stage now in lieu of the last stage.

Now you need to enter Stage 4 - Execute Offerings. This stage covers delivering offerings based on Stage 3 results, training of your resources, measuring the success of your best practices and methodologies, and performing continual feedback into the globalization effort for improvement.  This is a big tactical step in the globalization effort.  How well did your resource deliver?  Were they local or did you have global support?  Did they have everything they needed?  The one thing that you will discover in this stage is that although now you’ve standardized on the services delivery side, you are facing diversity among your customer base - both locally and globally.  You will need to consider as you adopt the global best practices and methodology what needs to be changed locally to adapt to the customer base.  Are your offerings more fixed price than time & materials?  Do you have more large customers or several smaller customers that require a lowering of overhead activities to maintain profitability?  The definition of offerings based on best practices and methodologies needs to handle the flexibility that the last hurdle, your customer base, requires.  Local laws, requirements for certifications such as ISO, and customer industry requirements are all areas that can influence your engagement.  Adjusting offerings to your local customer base will provide feedback on the best practices and methodologies going forward and give you the ability to start specializing in offerings by industry, customer type, and so forth. 

By now you may have figured out my overall Stage approach:  GLOBE.
- Stage 0 - Global Thinking
- Stage 1 - Logistics
- Stage 2 - Operations
- Stage 3 - Best Practices and Methodologies
- Stage 4 - Execute Offerings

To take on the challenge in each stage, you must start with Stage 0 - Global Thinking and see yourself as your customers see you.  Be prepared for a lot of hard work and constant challenges.  You and your customers will both benefit in the end.