These Best Practices Can Radically Improve Your Professional Services Business

The professional services industry is a growing, changing, and constantly evolving industry, one where the processes and technology best suited for optimal business performance are evolving just as quickly. Even the best professional services organizations can get lost navigating the powerful currents reshaping the industry around them.

Kantata recently partnered with SPI Research to shine a light on emerging trends in the professional services industry on the webinar Elevate Your Business Performance: Takeaways from the 2022 PS Maturity™ Benchmark . On this webinar, Jeanne Urich, Managing Director at Service Performance Insight, and Charles Gustine, Brand Evangelist at Kantata, highlighted some of the key findings from the latest PS Maturity Benchmark from SPI, focusing on what the data in the benchmark says about the best practices that lead to high performance.

Professional Services Execution Best Practices

What are the best practices professional services organizations can adopt to improve services execution? Here are some of the best practices Jeanne and Charles discussed::

• Integrating resource management processes with the sales pipeline and capacity plan
• Breaking down silos that negatively affect project staffing
• Providing team members with insights needed to balance project timeline, budget, and scope
• Continually refining standard delivery methods
• Steering toward high-value projects
• Building a “one team” mentality

The common factor between these best practices is connection. That includes connecting systems, data, processes, and team members, whether they be employees, partners, contractors, or clients. When businesses get these things right, they are able to foster a communicative, collaborative and informed workforce that is better equipped to work together and deliver high quality services and transformational outcomes. So often, it’s often a lack of information and complications that arise in internal collaboration that end up creating unnecessary hurdles for team members during projects. Eliminating these through consistently executed best practice adoption can make a major difference in client satisfaction, project success, and profit margins.

The Focus of a Leader

A team is only as good as its leader and every professional services business needs a leader with both clarity of vision for the company and a deep understanding of their team’s needs. Here are three major areas we highlighted that successful leaders pay special attention to:

• Service Packaging: This includes standardizing knowledge capture, IP development, and repeatable frameworks for services to be delivered in a consistent manner.
• Quality Management: Leaders should provide consistent delivery methods, use a project dashboard for greater visibility, and provide quality reviews to ensure high quality work.
• Resource Management Effectiveness: The use of integrated CRM and PSA software to optimize capacity planning and resource management keep resources well utilized across all projects.

Together, these three focus areas help managers ensure their teams are providing high quality services in a replicable manner while also keeping resources working at a strong and consistent pace behind the scenes. While it can be easy to lose focus on one of these areas, the imbalance will only hurt the business. If services are not high quality, clients won’t commit to return business. If projects aren’t managed in a consistent manner, then it can be difficult to replicate past success. And if teams aren’t efficient at packaging and pricing services, then profit margins are vulnerable and projects can unexpectedly cost the company money.

These are just a few elements of running a successful professional services business, but when implemented correctly, they can mean a world of difference to how day-to-day operations are done.

Find Success With Insights

Professional services businesses succeed because of the knowledge they have, both about their own organization and the changing industry around them. Find out more about the evolving professional services industry by watching the webinar: Elevate Your Business Performance: Takeaways from the 2022 PS Maturity™ Benchmark.