Professional Services for Software Companies: People, Organization, and Processes

February 26, 2013

In an earlier blog post, I discussed a common challenge with business software companies as they enter the expansion stage: establishing and growing a professional services team that can help them address the particular and stringent services demands of enterprise customers.
What factors should you consider when building out your consulting services organization for the first time? As with building any organization, there are always three critical aspects to consider: People, Organization, and Processes.

People

More than with any other team in a technology company, the professional services team’s very survival is absolutely dependent on the talent and dedication of its team members. The best professional services talent has the rare combination of technical expertise, a collaborative working style, and a customer-centered attitude. Senior professional services team members, like those at consulting organization, also must be great leaders to their teams, mentors to junior members, and innovators of the services products.
In no organization is employee development as important as in a professional services organization, because having good employee development programs helps to retain and develop employees, allowing the team to be more successful, which then allows it to attract even more talent in a virtuous cycle.
Because a professional services team is so dependent on the productivity and effectiveness of each of its team members, the company’s leaders and the professional services leaders need to be cognizant of the evolution of the working environment, team culture, and level of motivation, and also have the skill and experience to address issues with a lot of finesse. Addressing them well requires a different skill set than, let’s say, building a hard-charging sales team, or getting a creative marketing team together. The most important roles and qualities to consider, first and foremost are:

  • Since professional services work is heavily dependent on great teamwork, you must identify the roles required in a successful engagement, such as the project developer, the client coordinator, or the implementer.
  • These client-facing team members typically need a supporting team that consists of specialists, internal coordinators, and product/services innovators.
  • Each role should then be defined by the required hard and soft skills, level of experience, and special ability that makes a team member ideal for the responsibilities of the role.

However, these roles should not be totally fixed in stone — there must also be options for team members to grow or transition from one role to another as their skills and experience accumulate and interest change over time. Therefore, the company must describe a developmental plan for professional service team members and stipulate how they can progress through the plan they choose.

Organization

Having strong team members is not enough to ensure success — those members can only thrive in a structure that helps them succeed in their engagement and strengthen the long-term viability of the organization.
Because professional services engagements are heavily team-oriented, team members will thrive under strong, well-structured organization that brings consistency and ensures smooth coordination and transition from task to task.
At the same time, because professional services are typically very project-driven with a high level of variation in demand, workload, and variety of tasks, the organization needs to be flexible and minimalistic — that is, to do away with unnecessary layers of management and hierarchy.
Another key characteristic of the successful professional services organization is that it should be outward and forward-looking. It should be structured so as to easily absorb new capabilities, new team members, and new responsibilities. Again, this is achieved by having a flexible and open structure that does not pigeon-hole team members into specific, permanent roles or responsibilities, which often results in them becoming desiccated over time.

Processes

Lastly, the professional services team needs processes that will bind the team together, smooth out growing pains, and give the organization the flexibility needed to adapt to changing customer requirements and marketing demands. Strong processes also bring consistency to project planning, time estimates, and resource allocation, which all ultimately contribute to making the team stronger, the engagements more profitable, and the customers more satisfied.
Processes should not be limited to rules and regulations because teams also need processes to better collaborate, make good decisions, and on-board new team leaders more quickly.
There needs to be a process to help build new processes, or to adjust existing processes, because an organization will always have to evolve over time and therefore needs a framework to adapt to change and innovate.

Do you have any thoughts on how to build professional services teams for software companies?

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.