The Professional Services (consulting) organisation of the client had grown through acquisition and while it was functioning okay there were several issues:

• Project over-runs were common, but many were being ‘absorbed’ by the business rather than being charged to the client – impacting overall profitability of the business.
• Project escalations to the Exec were a regular occurrence. Clients and sales team were in the habit of taking these directly to the Exec team – such that they generated a lot of noise and dissatisfaction for everyone involved.
• There was a lot of friction between Sales and Delivery teams – each blaming the other for poor scoping / long approval processes for Statements of Work (SoWs) / project delivery issues.

Together these were having a significant impact on the profitability of the Professional Services organisation and on morale of both PS delivery and Sales teams. The Exec team were frustrated that so many issues were being escalated to them that they felt the business should be able to resolve without them.

I was asked to take on the Delivery Lead role to both operationally run the business, but more importantly to diagnose the underlying causes of the symptoms described above – poor profitability, over-runs, escalations, teams not working effectively together.

I started to understand this by doing two things:

• Understand the data – created reports to quantify the number of days of over-run / the effective day rate of projects (inc over-run) / billable rates for projects over the previous FY and current FY.
• Discovery – I spent time with Sales, Project Managers and Delivery teams to understand the processes used to scope SoWs, the underlying causes of project over-run and the reasons why this over-run was often shared with the client / additional payment requested via CR and causes of project escalations.

This allowed me to diagnose the fundamental underlying causes of the issues – in summary:

1. Poor process governance around the scoping of SoWs and work estimation. No formal process that involved all of the right people in SoW review and approval. Because the process was not defined and was perceived to ‘take too long’ – contracts would often be shared with clients before they were completed / have been reviewed both technically and commercially
2. Poor process governance around additional work required on projects – CRs were often not raised or if they were raised clients would decline them because they considered the work to be ‘in-scope’ (see issue re: SoW scoping above)
3. No target KPI defined around effective day-rate – so Project over-runs were effectively ‘hidden’ in the data.
4. Escalation paths were not consistently defined and shared with all internal and client stakeholders.

To tackle these issues – we acted in several areas:

1. Redefined WHO should be involved in reviewing and approving SoWs and contracts (to include all relevant teams). Created an automated approval flow (PowerAutomate) and reporting dashboard, integrated in Teams – to provide a simple & effective approval process.
   1. Redefined the process such that NO SoW should be shared with a client until it had been fully approved by all required approvers
   2. Established SLAs for approval timeframe
2. Worked with PMs and Sales team to reiterate the importance of raising CRs as soon as it was clear that a change of scope / potential over-un might happen – ‘No surprises’ rather than ‘last minute’
3. Worked with PMs and Sales team to define formal escalation paths for all projects – and worked hard with all teams to catch issues early and dela with them at source or the lowest possible escalation level – through this we were able to demonstrate that most issues could be resolved early rather than needing to be escalated to the Exec
4. Introduced 2 new KPIs to the business – so that so that the impact of all invest / over-run was visible:
   1. Invest / Over-Run days FY YTD
   2. “Effective Day Rate” –

Overall results were very positive:

• Effective day rate increased 20% from £1124 in previous FY to nearly £1400
• SoWs and Contracts were much better scoped and sold at better day rates – reduced need for over-runs.
• CRs were consistently raised early – resulting in clients paying for additional work more often
• Escalations were raised early and with the right people – and were resolved quickly and easily without the need to escalate to the Exec.

And more importantly the Sales and Delivery teams started to work together more collaboratively – recognising that they were working together towards shared goals rather than working in opposition to each other

• Process Analysis
• business process
• Business & Operational Analysis
• Project Reporting

• Process Effectiveness & Automation

• Business Services