Introducing the 2023 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark

By Chris Scalia, Chief Customer Officer, Kantata

This is an excerpt of Kantata’s introduction to SPI’s 2023 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark report. Click here to download the full report for free.

I’m excited to present you with the 2023 edition of the annual SPI Professional Services Maturity Benchmark, which analyzes the performance of over 700 professional services businesses of all shapes and sizes.

At Kantata, the Professional Services Maturity Benchmark is an invaluable tool we use with our customers and prospective customers to help establish
a picture of what’s possible through the digital transformation of their PS organizations. SPI’s annual research provides essential, up-to-date information
on what high performance looks like across key pillars, while also providing a constructive framework for understanding the sequence of steps required to achieve operational maturity. I encourage you to actively use this report to evaluate how your business stacks up and find key strategic areas for optimization and transformation.

As Kantata’s Chief Customer Officer, I have spoken with many professional services organizations that are navigating economic challenges and struggling to make critical decisions with confidence. These organizations are wondering what they can do, when demand is more volatile than ever, to ensure their business is in a position to consistently deliver work, while protecting their
margins, their clients, and their valued team members. This year’s benchmark tells a story of an industry that has found ways to protect and enhance financial performance – profitability increased from 2021 to 2022 – while also struggling to fully come to grips with lingering impacts from the pandemic, changing work norms that create productivity risks, and an ongoing talent war that can threaten the core of a PS organization. These overarching challenges have resulted in the degradation of certain Key Performance Indicators, with average employee billable utilization and project margins below five year averages, the number of projects delivered on time dipping by 5%, and project overruns increasing by 21%.

Despite these apparent headwinds, the SPI report again highlights the relationships between higher performance and adoption of purpose-built technology solutions for PS organizations. For organizations with over 50 employees, the difference between businesses using a solution in SPI’s PSA category and those that are not is significant. Adopters of PS-specific solutions, for example, enjoy a 5% difference in average billable utilization and a 16% difference in average project margins.

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Download the Professional Services Maturity Benchmark to learn how these results align with the improvements Kantata’s customers are seeing when they adopt the Kantata Professional Services Cloud. As a preface to the benchmark, we demonstrate some of the many ways the Kantata Cloud is driving transformational outcomes for Kantata’s customers – who make up 30% of the surveyed users in this study, the most of any provider in SPI’s PSA category.