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Approach to operations in professional services

Recently, I have been reflecting on what makes a successful professional services operation and what fundamental principles can be applied to most business models from an ops perspective. Reflecting on what challenges are present in an operation, and what good, or bad, looks like. It’s important to understand what a successful operation consists of, so you can design, build, flex, scale, and transform an operation that delivers your desired results based on customer needs.

Reverse principles perspective

First, it’s helpful to look at it in reverse and understand what the opposite of a good operation looks like. Thinking about all the areas that can cost an operation from basic operational delivery. Looking back at my career thus far, I look for common threads that have been uniform for most operational business groups I have led or witnessed. Whether it be roles leading operations in automotive supply chain and logistics, or leading a Talent Acquisition team across EMEA, there are multiple glaring items that typically stand out in an operation, and for a number of reasons. These are areas that must be evaluated when you start in a new role, when cleaning up your own operation, or when you are working more from a continuous improvement standpoint with your ongoing management of an operation. Focus areas help remind you of what’s important. We are all guilty of ignoring aspects of the business that seem to just run…or at least seemingly just run. But we all have aspects of our operation that need improvement, but we must be honest when looking at them, with eyes wide open.

Ops Focus: Areas of Operational Concerns

• People

• Leadership

• Expectations

• Accountability

• Alignment of internal and client business objectives

• Unrealistic financial targets

• Customer partnership deprioritized

• Employee appreciation

• Communication and trust

• Corporate support

• Operational/delivery model

• Organizational structure

• Productivity & Performance Delivery

• Process

• Technology

• Consistency

• Efficiency

• Cost effectiveness

• Innovation

• Growth through saturation

• Growth through business development

As you work on your own business goals and dreams, consider some wisdom nuggets accumulated through researching mindset and frameworks over the last 18 months, and throughout my professional career.

Professional service operational principles to live by

• Keep the main thing, the main thing

• Do what you say you’re going to do

• If you break it, fix it

• Customer delight, not customer always right

• Priorities drive profit

• Investment, not cost

• Learn, don’t fail

• Cutting costs, not service level

• People centric with data supporting facts

• Don’t give away the farm, or discount the house

• If you can operate it, operate it

As you work to improve your business and take it to the next level, keeping culture front and center is important for intentional culture development. Building a culture with keeping your customer first is critical. Take a look below for some requests from customers that seemed impossible at that time they requested the help.

Examples of Impossible Customer Requests that Became Possible

• Request to check 1000+ vehicles by morning (in the dark) to avoid vehicle shipping delays

• Deliver on high 100+ volume operators in rural Germany with no meaningful marketing budget

• Fill 75 skilled technicians within three months

• Fill team of 5 embedded software engineers with below market pay rates maintaining high skill level, on fixed duration contract terms

• Deliver on cost savings initiative exceeding $200M

• Reduce spend by 10-15% minimum for large scale staffing delivery operation

• Filling 50 sales roles across EMEA in less than 18 months

• Catching up from 3000+ openings to fill 3000+, and then 6000+ high volume openings across two year

Impossible is all about perspective - it’s all relative. Whether it be necessary to deliver on the impossible, or to deliver on the routine, it all matters to your customers. If you can make the routine work important to your team members, and empower them to prioritize your clients, you can foster an environment that makes the routine work the table steaks, delivering high value and service through the regular course of business. This makes the impossible requests, highly aggressive timelines, seemingly unattainable productivity or quality standards more realistic, giving you that opportunity to wow your customer each and every time. Empowering your team to develop into experts in your business, their craft, allows for more impossible to happen.

Hopefully, this added a little value to your business or your career. Thank you for reading.

Climb Higher, Raise Your^ROI

CONTENT RESOURCES

https://blog.hubspot.com/service/service-operations#:~:text=Operations%20Team%20Structure-,What%20is%20Service%20Operations%3F,a%20business%27s%20customer%20service%20organization