CEO’s Guide: Optimizing Internal Management for Professional Services Success

For professional services organizations, success is simply a mirror reflecting their clients’ success.

The definition of success for most professional service teams is delivering the project on time and under budget. While this worked for years, this definition no longer applies to today’s dynamically evolving world.

In today’s landscape, the success of the definition extends beyond metrics of time and budget.

A client enters into a service agreement to achieve specific business objectives. Therefore you should focus on establishing a partnership where your contributions are beyond a mere transaction, but a pivotal chapter in clients’ story of progress and achievement.

Now that we’ve defined success, how can we gear ourselves up to seize it?

As the CEO of a professional services company Cyntexa, I’ve realized that the journey of client success begins much closer to home. It starts within our own organization. Before we start helping our clients, we must ensure that we’re operating at our best. This means optimizing internal management from resource usage and IT infrastructure to expense management, incident response, and more.

In this CEO’s guide, I am going to share my strategies and insights on how professional services companies can optimize their internal operations and deliver success to their clients.

So, let’s get started.

Resource Management: Balancing People, Projects, and Productivity

Resources are the biggest asset of service organizations. Human resources, intellectual, financial, physical, and digital resources come together to complete a task or project.

Resources management refers to identifying the resources needed to complete a project and allocating them accordingly to achieve these goals.

According to a study conducted by TeamStage, 60% of organizations said poor resource management is one of the biggest challenges for them.

Here are the tried and tested strategies I’ve followed at Cyntexa to balance people, projects, and productivity.

Aligning Skills with Project Needs

How do you ensure that the right human resources are deployed on the right projects? Often business leaders struggle to gain accurate and timely visibility into the resource’s skills, availability, and capacity.

Here are the best practices you can follow to ensure that the right resources are deployed on the right project;

• Assess the technical and soft skills of the human resources to find out the areas where their skills are most suitable.
• Draft the project scope in a clear and detailed manner to find out the specific skills and expertise required to meet specific project goals.
• Align the skills of your resources with the project’s requirements.
• Maintain open communication among your resources and clients to ensure that the expectations are aligned and changes are addressed promptly.
• As the project evolves, reassign the resources according to new responsibilities.

Building High-Performing Teams.

High-performing teams refer to groups of employees with the talent, skills, and motivation to produce superior results for their parent organizations.

These teams have the expertise and most apparently the unweaving dedication to delivering the results expected, However, building high-performing teams is beyond finding and uniting the talent to work to achieve a single set of objectives.

Even if you have the best talent available and work on a single set of objectives, it requires a strategic approach to build high-performing teams. Here at Cyntexa, we’re driven by the following development framework to turn average teams into exceptional performers:

• Team formation: The first step is to find the right talent and lay out clear expectations, KPIs, and success conditions.
• Training: We believe in continuous improvement, By providing training, we work towards building additional skills in our workforce that put us in a better position to achieve goals.
• Acceleration: Once the goals are accurately defined, and your team has the skills to achieve those goals, they can focus on increasing their productivity.
• Analyzing and correcting course: As a team working on the project, it’s time to evaluate the processes and performance of each member. Address inefficiencies, and open up about the conflicts or other issues hampering the team’s performance.
• Improvement and recognition: Now your team is competent to work towards the goals. You have to provide the team with the options or incentives that inspire them to continue doing their great work. Also, you should have processes in place to reward the team when they meet certain goals.

Apart from following this development framework, at Cyntexa we rely on a technology called ServiceNow HR Service Delivery to build high-performing teams. Utilizing its features like scenario modeling, we can analyze the different scenarios to identify the most effective way to manage resources to meet customer needs in increased times of demand.

Utilizing Technology for Efficiency

Technology is the biggest ally for all sizes of businesses. From small to large organizations majority of their internal operations are driven by technology.

A breakdown of this technology could cripple the organization’s ability to serve its clients. Therefore, you should have a system to prevent those breakdowns and ensure continuous operation.

At Cyntexa, we rely on ServiceNow ITOM to gain visibility into the IT infrastructure, predict the issues, and ensure prompt resolutions before they disrupt the services.

It provides the single source of truth for all IT resources including on-premise or cloud. With a detailed view of all the IT resources and cloud services such as IaaS, PAAS, and SaaS, we can easily identify the problems that might disrupt the services.

Furthermore, ITOM also provides visibility into the usages of the IT resources and their capacities. So we can ensure the optimal usage of them.

Ensuring Data Security and Accessibility

According to Proofpoint insider threats have risen 44% since 2020. Also, the average cost per threat is over $15 million.

Data security breaches not only cost you money but also affect your credibility to serve clients. Security is paramount for us, and here are the strategies that we’re following to ensure data security and accessibility;

• With Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), we ensure that the individual users within the enterprise have access to the information based on their roles. This way only people working on the project have access to the information, reducing the scope of data breach.
• We follow strong encryption algorithms to ensure that data at rest and in transit are protected from unauthorized access and breaches.
• Maintaining regular data backups increases our ability to recover in case of data loss.
• As part of our employee training, we educate our employees on how to adapt best security practices.

Final Take

As said in the beginning, the success of a professional services company is a mirror reflecting your client’s success. By optimizing your internal operations, you’re not only improving your own organization but also contributing to the success of the client. I have shared a few tips that can help you to manage your internal operations more seamlessly.