A Professional Services Foundation for Achieving Business Value

I am on the inside looking out of a niche software vendor’s Professional Services organization these days. The team hasn’t had strong leadership or direction in well over a year. Their business processes are not reliable or even repeatable. They consistently work 70+ hours a week to just barely tread water. They are exhausted and underappreciated, in a most untenable situation. And sadly, despite their competence and professionalism, all of this is painfully visible to their clients, who are not happy at all.

Standing back from the chaos that surrounds me, I need to consider what’s really, really most critical to this team’s success, and fix it really, really fast.

Where to start to define this team’s success? Well, is a successful implementation more than a list of implementation steps regardless of how they are achieved? In other words, is it a successful implementation even if it is utter chaos getting there?

I have to say no. Process alone doesn’t guarantee business value, but it does drive down cost, which can in turn increase value. But that’s only part of the solution. Here’s my short list of stand-out remedies that I expect will change the course of this team’s future and ultimately help to deliver very competitive value to their clients.

Develop products and services that address client needs. This Professional Services organization comes from a tradition of delivering whatever the client asks. With no delimiting scope or roadmap, implementation projects would veer into schedule delays, feature creep, cost overruns and more, at great cost to them as well as to their clients.

Productizing the company’s Professional Service offerings will allow clients to choose the services they need from a predefined, commonly requested menu-type list. Behind the scenes, structured deliverables, a repeatable process and a solid cross-functional team will help to deliver a predictable and reliable outcome. Of course, additional custom services will continue to be an option, packaged and priced in a manner that demonstrates their incremental value.

Reset business processes. One of the problems with moving too fast for too long is that we tend to forget that there are other options. Heads up! This team is getting off their treadmill and taking their vast expertise and experience with them, redefining business processes based on what makes sense rather than what they did before. Then, we are going to become a learning organization with an open mind, experimental approach, and the ability to constantly learn from our successes and failures.

Collaborate laterally, vertically, internally, externally. The technical and subject matter expertise required to deliver this company’s solution is broad and very complex. Implementations also usually include coordination across multiple corporations. There are many, many moving parts. In this context, communication has to extend far beyond the next upstream or downstream link in the chain. It has to consider “Who might want to know?”  and it requires reaching out in new ways that require thinking far outside the usual box.

These three steps do not guarantee success or necessarily drive business value. But I maintain that it is not possible to deliver business value to the client without these foundations in place.