Throughout my career I’ve been on the technical side as a programmer and the managerial side as a project manager, team manager, and now company owner.  What has been interesting is seeing the different professional services business models across the various commercial companies I’ve crossed paths with - namely pure consulting organizations and product companies with services.

Politics and religion are two topics my mother told me to avoid unless I wanted the conversation to end in an argument. However, given that politics is the “topic of the year” (and was also in the forefront for the better part of last year!) it provides an interesting framework for discussing an issue of critical importance for all leaders: meaningful communication.

So, you have been offshoring for a while.  If your experience is similar to most companies, issues begin to creep into your offshore operation; expectations do not continue to be met consistently; and some in your management team may even question the wisdom of offshoring.  How do you address this situation? 

During my years of managing services delivery organizations for enterprise software companies, I have had contact with many great customers across a wide variety of industries.  The customers have been both large and small and have been located all around the world.

The effectiveness of a professional services organization (PSO), whether a professional services firm or an internal service organization, depends on its ability to fully leverage its collective skills and expertise to efficiently generate business and deliver work product of the highest quality.

Last year my friend Mark led an effort to reinvent his professional services group. The exercise was a success, but the outcome may surprise you. I asked Mark to share this extraordinary experience, and this is his story. 

AFAB (A-fab) noun:

1. a sale of “anything for a buck” in order to generate revenue and keep billable employees busy
2. a business situation which can impede company growth, differentiation and/or profits
3. in more mature firms, a symptom of lack of focus on specific product or service offerings

There is no time where mentoring may be more important within Professional Services. As many firms have cut back on tangible expenses such a professional development and training, it takes little if anything from the budget to foster a strong mentoring program. 

Best practice is defined by the American Society of Quality (ASQ), the world’s leading authority on quality, as “A superior method or innovative practice that contributes to the improved performance of an organization, usually recognized as best by other peer organizations.”

Many professional service organizations today depend on outside vendors and partners to carry out their service delivery activities. The decision to use partners to deliver services can be influenced by any number of factors including financial, resource, geographic or product related circumstances. 

In a rapidly commoditizing technology market, Professional Services have become the glue between disparate technologies and clients.  Until now, little if any research examined Professional Service strategies and benchmarks within the context of a rapidly maturing technology environment. 

Getting your services marketing efforts “up to the nines,” may be easier than you think. The following proven maxims are aimed at helping you reach the highest degree in services marketing.

What is a “Be-Back”?

Some time ago, I was on a routine sales call with the PS director of a global product company.  Once we were finished with the opening chit-chat, I asked the customary-and-generally-accepted-ice-breaker question:  ‘So, what keeps you up at night?”

Where is the focus in a software company?  Marketing and selling the product.  In a perfect world, revenue splits would be 80/20 product/service.  But you have to have a very mature/stable product - when was the last time you worked anywhere the product was mature AND stable?

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--

1) The Right Way to Give a Critique

The worst thing you can do if you want to get somebody to listen to you is to criticize him or her. As human beings, we hate being criticized. When attacked we attack back. And we attack even when we are in the wrong. Right or wrong has nothing to do with it.

Project margin is a key metric to manage in a services business.  Nothing gets to the issue of services profitability as quickly as project margin.  Often, project margin is measured and analyzed at Director levels and above. 

The Case for Packaged Services

Create powerful differentiation for your company while making the job of resource management easier at the same time - sounds like something worth doing! 

In my twenty-five years in professional services, I’ve seen plenty of troubled projects, dissatisfied clients, and burned out teams. And I’ve never seen a project where expectations got set perfectly during the sales process, and clients got exactly what they thought they would get. 

Face it - we consultants really want to develop deep relationships with our clients - and keep them coming back for more of our services.  One key way to do that is to develop industry best practices - demonstrating real depth in the industry of our clients. 

I’ve been thinking about integrity. Especially about how I handle those times when I haven’t accomplish what I said I would. I think of these as integrity breakdowns.

Right now I’m managing a project team, and we haven’t fulfilled several of our commitments. We’ve had a lot of slippage. I’ve been feeling anxious and frustrated because the slippage has continued, despite my best efforts.

When my wife and I saw “Lost in Translation,” she liked the movie, but didn’t like seeing it with me.  Now that’s not usually the case, I might add.  It’s just that I seemed to find parts of it funny (and laughed out loud) when no one else did.

As a veteran of the corporate climb I grew up, like most of you, on hard work and little advice.  Early in any career you survive on pure will or youthful ignorance to succeed. 

For organizations offering complex services and solutions, no one has more impact on getting and keeping customers than the technical expert.(1)

INTRODUCTION

The technology professional services business is starting to mature.  Signs that the industry has moved from “birth” to “adolescence” or even “adulthood” are everywhere. Gone are the days of the “ants” - Viant, and Scient, with huge market capitalization but limited profits. 

Q:  How do you eat an elephant?
A:  One bite at a time.

In a world of increasingly complex projects, constant competitive pressure, and diminishing margins, today’s Services leaders face unprecedented pressure to improve every facet of services delivery to drive profitability. 

According to CIO Magazine, “Companies worldwide are growth-oriented as never before. Their strategic priorities have shifted decisively over the past three years from controlling costs to pursuing new opportunities for revenue growth.”

Recently there was a story in the press about a Silicon Valley software company pulling the plug on its Indian operation. They decided to close their entire development operation and bring it back to the U.S. Some others have closed up shop quietly.

You can’t manage time. You can only manage yourself. Successful people manage to get a lot more out of their time. Here are nine things that you can focus on next year to make the most out of your time.

If I had a nickel for every time a professional services organization told me it needed marketing support but just wasn’t getting it, I could retire. Okay, perhaps not retire, but at least I could buy a round of macchiatos at Starbucks for everyone in the office.

Growing competition fueled by globalization of the economy is putting unprecedented pressure on service providers to rapidly innovate in many aspects of service delivery. 

Now that you’ve decided to deploy Professional Services Automation (PSA) software, you can be sure that your service projects will run efficiently and be more cost effective, right? 

To achieve results, focus can be a good thing. But I know that sometimes I get so focused on results that I don’t notice what’s going on around me. I get such tunnel vision that people begin to show up as obstacles, not as sources of help.

A while back I was having lunch with a former client who had become a colleague and friend. We were discussing a project we had both been involved in when the conversation turned to one of the consultants who was working on the project and had been requested by my former client to be removed from the project.

A recent Gartner study revealed that a full 66% of large scale projects fail to achieve their stated business objectives, are delivered late, or are substantially over budget.  That’s a pretty amazing statistic - but one that’s easy to believe for anyone with a few years experience in the Professional Services arena.