Services engineering is a complex discipline, encompassing several distinct processes that often get intertwined in the minds of PS professionals. These processes include services development, services packaging, go-to-market (GTM), and portfolio management—activities that often span, and are led by, different disciplines (services marketing, services engineering, and/or services delivery) depending on your particular organization model. Among these processes, one key activity is rarely called out as a distinct process: services packaging. Yet with the right approach to this aspect of PS, you can bring customer-tested services to market faster, iteratively improve them, and easily produce the GTM materials necessary to sell them. If this sounds too good to be true, read on.

Packaged Goods What people typically refer to as “services development” is actually two distinct processes: the creation of the processes and procedures that comprise what a consultant actually does during a professional services engagement, and the packaging of this tacit knowledge for reuse by other delivery consultants. Some companies further confuse the issue by lumping GTM into the mix as well, treating all three as one unified process. Clearly distinguishing between services development and services packaging (and GTM) helps you avoid elongated development cycles and better enables you to create services customers actually want to buy.

The benefits of this approach include faster and smoother GTM, more-robust service materials for your delivery teams, and quicker revenue generation, thereby driving up the perceived success of the services engineering team. As strong as these benefits are, we believe breaking services packaging out as a distinct process has even more-powerful, but subtle results: it provides the foundation for a rapid, iterative services development methodology and sets the table for continuous improvement, which results in the creation of services that continually evolve to meet customers’ evolving needs - and to reflect your organization’s deepening understanding of those needs.

“Productize" or “Package”? First, let’s address some terminology. Whereas “productize” is often used to describe this process, we prefer the term “package.” “Productize” implies a level of rigidity that few services can attain. Rather, what we’re doing is “packaging” services: taking tacit knowledge and making it explicit, and creating the supporting materials (data-gathering forms, delivery guides, customer deliverables, etcetera) required to create a repeatable services offering, all brought together in a nice package to facilitate more-effective services delivery.

Isn’t This Services Development? Although services development and packaging can be performed in parallel and are often intertwined, they are actually distinct activities that require slightly different skill sets. In a nutshell, think of services development as the creation of what your delivery team does on an engagement. In services development, you are focused on the technical tasks required to solve a customer’s problem. The service often evolves rapidly during the actual delivery, as your consultants better understand the many factors that can impact the solution. This is especially true when the service is delivered to different customers with unique environments, requirements, and business challenges.

Services packaging, on the other hand, is about abstracting the delivered service(s) into various materials that document the service so it can be clearly communicated to others for reuse and followed in a consistent fashion. Services development is about creating the service itself; services packaging is the act of capturing and describing the service for the delivery function (not to be confused with GTM, which is the process of packaging the service for sales and marketing).

Thinking about services packaging in this way enables a valuable approach: packaging services you’re already delivering. These services are the low-hanging fruit: they are obviously of value, since customers are already paying for them. Further, there is clearly a wealth of information ready to mine for packaging from the minds of the consultants delivering these projects and from the deliverables from prior engagements. The question isn’t, “How do I get my best delivery guys out of the field and into HQ so I can capture their knowledge?” Rather, you should be asking how you can get your services engineering team into the field watching live engagements, learning from them, and then packaging this knowledge into reusable services materials. Shadow engagements to capture how they are performed. Perform project reviews to gather intellectual property (IP) from completed engagements. Continuously improve by folding this IP into your service delivery materials, and get it back out to the field.

Field Development: Reduced Time to Market
If the idea of packaging what your field is already delivering makes sense, then we can challenge another sacred cow: Who says new services should be developed from scratch in a clean room in HQ? Why not develop them in the field with customers? In other words, move to a model where new services are delivered to customers early, even before they are strongly packaged and taken through GTM.

Getting in front of customers early has tremendous value. You validate whether there’s actually a customer need before spending lots of money and resources on the offering. Your consultants gain experience, references, and raw materials for delivery guides, case studies, and other necessary GTM materials. When the offering becomes generally available, you’re ready to hit the ground running. Say goodbye to those HQ “SWAT teams” that deliver new services for six to nine months and then struggle to turn the delivery responsibility over to the field. By definition, the field is already delivering! Finally, you will start generating revenue much more quickly than if you wait for the service to be fully perfected.

Your services marketing team will love this approach as well: it makes their life much easier during GTM. As mentioned earlier, GTM is the process that takes a service to market - basically where the sales and marketing materials are created, but not the service itself or the packaging of the services IP used by delivery consultants. GTM is where pricing models, marketing collateral, white papers, case studies, and other materials are developed. If you’ve followed the field-driven development and services packaging approach outlined above, the raw materials for all these deliverables already exist! And guess what? Your GTM process just became easier and faster to execute, and services marketing will no longer loathe the GTM process as one of trying to hit a moving (or nonexistent) target.

Iterative Development Methodology and Continuous Improvement
By thinking about services packaging as a distinct (and key) process, we can redefine the services development methodology as well. We can move away from a waterfall (sequential) development methodology to a more agile approach that is iterative in nature.

The iterative approach also avoids the “assembly-line” pitfall of services engineering, in which services are developed, kicked out to the field, and then never touched again. In addition, it solves a perennial problem for portfolio managers - how do I get my busy consultants to capture lessons learned from services engagements and improve our services?

Simply build triggers into your services delivery process to ensure you reengage the packaging process at the appropriate time to capture new IP. During your project closeout or review, for example, consider whether something occurred that indicates a need to capture lessons learned. Maybe the project experienced substantial cost overruns (or even was under budget), deviated from the expected duration, or encountered a configuration or requirements that hadn’t been seen before. The bottom line is that you need to set some criteria that keep the iterative process alive and healthy even after the service has been officially “completed.” (And you need to remember that in this new way of thinking, services are never really completed until they are end-of-life.)

This methodology also works for new services development, but we’ll cover that subject in more detail in future articles focused on a proposed RAD services development methodology and associated portfolio lifecycle management.

Sounds Like Knowledge Management
Yes, this sounds like knowledge management (KM), and indeed the process of packaging services can often leverage the discipline of KM, if this capability is in place in your organization. Think of KM as providing the foundation processes and tools that can be utilized when looking for knowledge to package around a service. Things like knowledge bases and communities of practice are gold mines of information to take advantage of when packaging services. For example, during a monthly community-of-practice call, solicit stories about current engagements: what is working well, challenges encountered, and other anecdotes from practitioners about their experiences delivering services. These stories will often suggest areas of improvement for the service, providing an opportunity to trigger the services packaging process and turn the consultant’s tacit knowledge into explicit updates of the service delivery materials.

Summary
Getting services to market and keeping them current is one of the more daunting challenges for a services organization. Key to success is ensuring you have clearly defined (and distinct) processes for services development, packaging, and GTM. Focusing on speed to market and packaging the right services based on market need helps drive the services packaging approach outlined above - because it works! The packaging component transforms services development from the typical sequential process to a more iterative one. Iterative services by their very nature have been “customer tested” before going live, which in turn drives the proper delivery and GTM collateral needed to drive sales.

The result? Adaptive, targeted services offerings; smoother GTM; faster revenue generation; and - most important - more-satisfied customers.

Building services and marketing services are sometimes very disconnected activities at product companies.  We live, work, think, talk and write about how to marry these two activities to drive solution sales and satisfied customers.  Keep your eye out for more articles on this topic.