What They Don’t Teach You at the Services Business School
Enabling the Highly Effective Service Organization
The past decade has seen tremendous growth in research and methodology for Professional Services and Consulting Services. Over the years, professional and industry associations have also sprung up catering to the unique needs of PS professionals. Today many companies implementing better discipline and process methods in their PS operations are beginning to see the benefits of knowledge and information capture, consistency, predictability and repeatability.
In spite of the progress made on so many fronts, too many firms still struggle with the basics – maintaining high utilization and effectively managing projects. Working with many firms to resolve these issues, we have found one critical and consistent roadblock that keeps these firms from achieving their goals in PS – the lack of disciplined fusion of process methodology and integrated services automation tools like Professional Services Automation. While both the processes and tools are extremely important, one simply will not work without the other.
This complimentary paper will discuss the often misunderstood aspect of services business operations effectiveness – the marriage of application integration, automation and process discipline, to achieve extraordinary gains in effectiveness and competitive advantage.