Why some love to hate professional services
OK, so I never promised I would stay on topic. Steve Hamrin’s brief comment awakened one my deepest passions and pet peeves with services companies: why do we rush to productize everything we do? Why do we only sell “what we’ve got” instead of “what you need”? Why does everything look like a nail to our hammer?
The beauty of not having a physical product is that we can be malleable, adaptive to the client’s needs. I have heard the argument–a million times–that services businesses cannot scale without repeatability and standardization. There is some truth to that…though part of it is driven by the inability of services companies and their customers to agree that customized, groundbreaking solutions come as a result of collaboration and innovation–abandoning old paradigms. And they cost more.
In a career entirely in professional services, nobody has ever come to me at the end of an engagement and said “Esteban, we love how your team applied a canned industry solution to us. We are so happy that we now have the same thing you can sell to any of our competitors”
What people have said to me, when we are successful, is “We love the way your team understood the unique nature of our problem and created a solution that differentiates us from other companies” That, I believe, is the reason clients can be delighted with professional services. The quote above is the moment that defines why I keep doing what I do.
What do you think?
Great blog and interesting debate Esteban!
I agree on the need for creative & customized solutions to be able to make a difference as compared to canned repeatable ones. However, the truth is somewhere in between and depends on how the companies define “canned”. One of the key inhibitors to creativity is that companies spend too much time re-inventing the wheel on routine or reusable parts of a solution. Sounds ironic, but finding the right stuff to standardize will free up time, money and other resources for greater creativity where really needed.
Custom solutions not only cost more but are also usually more risky and time-consuming (which itself adds risk), so the second necessary condition for success is how the companies mitigate the risks associated.
Comment by DAK — November 7, 2007 @ 7:29 am
Well put, Dileep. My colleagues, Vaughan Merlyn in particular (see his blog at http://itorganization2017.wordpress.com/), often speaks of “innovating at the edges”. I think you and I agree that we have to pick and choose the non-differentiating areas and disciplines where we could and should standardize. But we also agree that we have to be equally diligent about picking the areas where we must think way out of the box to make true innovation possible.
Comment by estebanherrera — November 7, 2007 @ 8:53 am