Strategic Management of Professional Services Firms – 2020 Professional Services Benchmark

Successfully managing a professional services firm is hard. The professional services industry is continually shifting to react to an ever-changing political, cultural, and technological landscape. Yet, this constant change is the very reason that professional services firms exist in the first place. As this year’s 2020 Professional Services Benchmark puts it, “without disruption and change…clients would not need expert help to navigate new opportunities and landmines.”

In the face of this continual change, we have found one fundamental concept that has remained a constant truth, proven over time. This core concept is the secret to running a successful professional services firm: the importance of balance. It’s all too easy to optimize one piece of the business to the detriment of the others.

Focus exclusively on delivering exceptional work, and profitability suffers. Shift to maximizing profit, and you risk sacrificing how efficiently you’re utilizing resources at all levels of the organization. This is exactly what point solutions—each individually focused on project management or resource scheduling or time and expense tracking—do.

One of the key insights of SPI’s Benchmark Survey is the importance of forcing balanced optimization of utilization, delivery, and profitability—all of which, when combined, enables sustainable growth. The benchmark is also crystal clear about the benefits of implementing process and systems, most importantly Professional Services Automation (PSA) solutions, to drive that balanced optimization. As SPI puts it, “As competition and volatility intensify, information has become a competitive weapon to increase performance and profit. Lack of an effective information infrastructure is no longer an option!”

All of this begs the question: with the importance of balanced optimization, are your business systems keeping up, or are they holding you back?

We here at Projector PSA are proud to have played a small role in the success of our clients by building Professional Services Automation software designed to allow organizations to balance the interdependencies among operations, delivery, and finance to enable scalable growth.

As a proud sponsor of the work SPI does to help the professional services community measure and improve its performance, we hope that it provides some valuable perspective as you evaluate yours.

SPI Research

Should you be interested in finding out more about systems like Projector PSA, we welcome the opportunity to speak with you about the challenges you face and how to turn those challenges into competitive advantages. We are pleased to have played a small part in bringing you this important work and hope the insight it contains will help you to achieve your goals no matter what surprises 2020 and beyond may bring.

Projector PSA Logo 2020

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