7 Key Factors Driving Successful Project Management in Professional Service Delivery

Efficient service delivery is based on getting the project management engine as finely tuned as possible so that it runs smoothly.  This is what we are referring to as the seven key drivers of successful project management.

These factors are critical in ensuring you’re preforming at your peak – delivering to your clients in line with the highest standards of executional excellence. These seven key factors maximize your company’s core capabilities through….

Underpinning Effective Service Delivery by keeping your service delivery in synchronization with customer demands – helping you to better cope with change.

Driving improved Project Performance by standardizing the way projects are managed and reported on, through a standard set of processes and tools.

Managing Resources more Strategically by providing the visibility needed to make smarter resourcing decisions - focusing on the long term demand for resource and your resource capability rather than solely focusing on short term resource utilization. For example, how you look at individual workloads to marry them against long term engagements, your pipeline and  business objectives. Making sure that you maximize chargeability, minimize downtime and make sure you make the correct recruitment or training decisions.

Improving Knowledge Management and Innovation is a great platform of opportunity for professional services organizations across the board. The more you can disseminate the knowledge and experience you have within the company, across the company, the more your whole organization continues to raise its standards of excellence. There are solutions that can make this happen as a matter of course. You can’t just depend on colleagues to give up time to pass on all their own insights but at the same time there are enormous economies of scale to be gained if you can benchmark approaches to similar projects and not have to start from scratch every time.

Assuring Project Profitability. Improved reporting…keeping track of financials – logging expenses early, regular reviews of costs, are all key aspects of delivering profitable projects. Attention to detail makes a big differences in this area and it’s not something that should be left unstructured. There was a 2012 study which revealed how gross project margins in excess of 60% are possible when every single cost is captured and billed and when resources are systematically managed. The study also showed how project yields can drop to single digits, or go negative when apparently unimportant aspects of project management are allowed to slip.

Enabling Flexible Resourcing. Do you really make the best use of staff time, all the time? The most successful professional services organizations are those with the most billable time per capita.

Better Project Cost Control is an area that arches over all other project management elements and dictates how you deploy your resources, what business you can realistically plan for, and basically the financial sense it makes for you to be involved with certain clients on certain projects.

To implement these key drivers might involve you making one or two adjustments in the way you do things –we’re not talking about any major overhaul in management procedures, or systems, or major new technology investment, or anything that might challenge your current culture – we’re talking about a series of interlocking efficiencies that are not just easy to implement but also make the way you run your projects easier too.

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