3 Key Challenges facing Professional Services in achieving effective service delivery

In an ideal world it would be sufficient to market your professional excellence, be paid a fair price for the input you make, and grow your company.

Unfortunately there are hundreds of other factors and pressures that make the world less than ideal. This is more than ever the case in an economic climate where nobody can be sure what the future holds. No organization can feel ultimately secure that the business base it has built and benefits from today will still be in place tomorrow.

For this reason it is vital that PSOs have complete control over the three key challenges you face all the time. The key considerations when it comes to delivering winning project performance every time.

Resource Management

Effectively managing resources can be a less than exact science. You have to keep everyone busy otherwise you're effectively losing money through your investment in the resource. You have to match the right resource to the right opportunity and at the same time manage and balance costs.

For this reason you need complete visibility and control over your resource pool and their work commitments.  Why not watch our short 2 minute video on how to effectively manage resource demand, capability and project allocations to find out more.

Project Management

From the Project Management point of view one of the biggest challenges is keeping customers in the loop and that means having a really up close and personal understanding of Project Progress at all times. This can be a really thorny area. If there are areas of the project that are taking maybe too long, or others where the scope has changed and the Project Manager hasn’t been notified, these sort of things can lead to a breakdown in communications. They can create misunderstandings which are easily avoided through effective project management protocols and systems. Managing deliverables closely requires process. The thing is in the world of professional services delivery, every skill, every talent, has to be run along certain tracks if it’s going to be profitable.  If you would like to explore how you can improve project management in a services environment, watch our short 3 minute video on effective project management .

Billing

Of course profitable project delivery puts a focus on Billings; making sure everything gets billed; and also ensuring accuracy.

It comes back to keeping clients in the loop. As long as they know precisely what the agreed deliverables are, how you bill them and when, what’s included and what isn’t, there shouldn’t be any surprises. This sort of transparency drives trust in the relationship.

Back to Mastering Professional Services Portfolio Management.