How to Create a Project Budget That Works

Every successful services business has a deep understanding of project budgets and what it takes to create an accurate budget and stay on target. While this may seem straightforward there are many complicating factors that must be taken into account regarding a project’s budget and keeping it on track. Success for a company demands a well-rounded knowledge of how to create a project budget that is realistic, achievable, and ultimately in service of healthy profit margins.

How to Build a Remote Sales Strategy to Win Over Prospects and Achieve Your Goals

The shift to remote work across nearly every industry around the globe has fundamentally changed the sales process. From the first engagement with a prospective client to completing the transaction, sales teams must now execute without the many benefits that come from face-to-face in-person interactions.

The Business Collaboration Checklist

Are you looking for ways to improve your company’s collaboration efforts?

Ensuring effective communication across an organization, especially during a time when a large portion of workers are distributed and primarily communicating with one another online, is critical for a company’s success. Creating great collaboration takes time and focused effort whether your organization has experience in remote work or not.

The Evolving State of Professional Services

Whether we are ready for it or not, the digital workplace has arrived. During this current crisis, businesses and individuals around the world have learned to depend on digital technology to survive. Getting comfortable with using cloud-based technology to collaborate, communicate, and coordinate essential projects using a distributed workforce once had a steep learning curve, but now is common. For many firms, this represents an enormous opportunity to emerge from economic uncertainty with...

How to Improve Customer Experience Through the Five C’s - Part 1

While the titles may have changed and adapted to industry trends over the years, all of us who work in services delivery are ultimately in the business of serving our clients and managing their customer experience (CX).

In a very telling statistic produced by our customer and partner, Qualtrics, 80% of CEOs believe their companies deliver a superior experience - while in reality, only 8% of their customers agree. Qualtrics has dubbed this the “Experience Gap.” It’s clearly a huge problem and...

What Are the 4 Most Common Challenges for a Scaling IT Services Organization?

Whether your IT services organization is an internal department working to support a larger business or a standalone company, growth is a consistent goal and a measure of success. But with growth there will inevitably be complications and challenges unique to your business.

What to Look for in Easy-to-Use Project Management Software

When most companies are looking to implement new project management software, their first question is “what project management software is the easiest to use?” Most of us know that the benefits of a project management software tool can be great—from maximizing efficiency to increasing profitability—but if the software isn’t easy to use, then no one will use it.

In an Increasingly Competitive Market, Professional Services Firms Need a Focused Approach

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the professional and business services is one of the fastest-growing segments in the industry. As a result, services organizations are clamoring to adapt to meet the needs of both their clients and the rapidly evolving spectrum of services for project-based work.

Resource Planning - Art vs. Science

There is an age-old debate within the professional services community about the best way to optimize resource utilization. Specifically, how do you maximize utilization of your existing resources, identify a shortage of specific skills and people, as well as the need to bring on additional people, and smooth out demand when you have peaks and valleys across client projects?

In short, how do you best match supply and demand?

The Top 6 Pressures Facing Services Firms Blog Series: Increased Competition

The services industry is experiencing new types of pressures that are changing businesses around the world. In this blog series, we will examine the six major pressures facing services firms today, their causes, and how you can successfully respond.

What the Numbers Say About Mobile’s Place in B2B Marketing

The history of business-to-business (B2B) marketing is a brief but winding one. Beginning as early as the 1920s, companies created targeted advertising in trade publications, urging other companies to purchase their wares. Mail-order catalogs followed these advertisements; and, eventually, enabled by the internet, today’s demand-generation marketing funnels arrived, ready to absorb website traffic and hopefully leave behind business leads.

Learning to Say Yes to the Right Projects

I often ask in my presentations on project management a question of the audience; “How many of you get to choose the projects that you manage?”

How to Transform Your Mindset in Today's Digital Revolution

We have written here many times how pronounced the digital revolution has been and its impact on professional and creative services firms. We’ve referenced articles and research on transformation and the agents of change that have been manifested in what most would agree is a disruptive landscape and industry that is struggling to stay current with today’s most sophisticated best practices. There continues to be much said on the nature of disruption and debate over what are the best...

60 Quotes to Inspire Collaboration in the New Year

Many startups have been transformed into some of the most impressive and admired brands today due to hard-working and cohesive teams. Seldom has anything of greatness been the result of a solo effort.

GRASP: Five Steps to Present a Compelling Argument

I have spent a number of years working in marketing, strategic planning, and branding and I’ve observed just how critical it is to be able to present one’s point of view and get people to “buy in.”

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