Key Takeaways: Future-Proofing The Professional Services Operations Playbook

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Consulting Magazine and Workday recently addressed an increasingly relevant concern for modern professional services firms – keeping up with digital transformation as they are utilized in our own operations.

We assembled three leading industry executives for a discussion on today's hyper-competitive environment, and the ability to make informed decisions – at light speed – across all operational functions of a client service organization.

While "digital transformation" may seem like an industry buzzword to some, to the informed, it is the seismic upheaval indicating where business-as-usual, must morph into business-as-science. Balancing the data, technology, and people formula is critical in the race to glean the most accurate and valuable information and cannot be miscalculated.

The panel considered important elements of this topic during the conversation moderated by Consulting Magazine's Michael Webb Thursday, Dec. 8. If you were unable to attend, you may go here and register by clicking the "Access On-Demand Webinar" button.

Thank you to Workday for sponsoring this informative webinar.

Thanks and appreciation also goes out to our distinguished panelists for their time and insightful commentary on this topic:

What was uncovered during the discussion? The following is a brief recap of some key takeaways from the webinar:

How have digital capabilities changed over the last 10 years?

  • The pace and scope of digital change over the last decade is massive. Digital transformation happens at all levels – from the executive boardroom to front-line operations, and while technology itself may not always be revolutionary, the end result is revolutionizing the approach to business through technology enablement.
  • As core finance capabilities have significantly shifted, the strategic role of the finance team has moved from traditional reporting/stewardship to business partnering. Finance is no longer a "back-office" function and now provides critical decision-making capability to service delivery teams. A cultural shift within organizations has occurred.
  • The historical HR mandate – to effectively manage HR policy, recruitment, performance and compensation management – has shifted to talent/skills inventorying/monitoring and developing key partnerships with training/talent development team, employee culture monitoring employee wellness, managing retention strategies, creatively sourcing talent and developing strong employee feedback loops and retention strategies.
  • Operational performance has evolved. Historically based on service delivery metrics and financial performance monitoring –traditional service delivery metrics although still important, are now supplemented by advanced operational/ financial/HR/compliance data, providing more holistic financial analysis of engagement on profitability and key HR metrics.

Technology platforms are strengthening the competencies needed to meet the demands of increasingly sophisticated clients.

  • Clients are seeking sophistical levels of operational/financial/people analysis – hence cross departmental teams become critically important to service delivery.
  • Strong platforms, and more importantly strong architecture and design, create simplicity in combining/understanding and analyzing data so analytics becomes democratized to key decision makers in the business – not the boardroom, but the shop floor and the front line.
  • The evolution of talent identification, tracking, development, and allocation has become a lynchpin in winning the service delivery battle – the ability to identify the right person, for the right engagement, for the right client leads to enhanced service delivery and advanced systems/platforms are core to this shift.

The benefits of adopting "data-driven operations."

  • Adopting an "analytics first" mindset – a disciplined set of robust metrics/analytics that truly represent the health of the business/department/function – and making decisions based on insights derived from those analytics will be key to taking advantage of data. It is important to maintain discipline on definitions, application and use of those analytics, and embed them into business decision culture.
  • Specifically for HR – employing trackable metrics (employee engagement, tenure, development/training time) combined with traditional HR metrics (performance reviews, peer ranking) can translate into better management of the talent pipeline coupled with skills tracking, and allow for the creation of a talent roadmap.
  • It is important for operations to have the ability to accumulate, understand, create insight from and disseminate analytics, as it will become a powerful tool in demonstrating a culture of thinking beyond simple service delivery to clients.

What are key strategies to outpace, outwit and out-deliver the competition?

  • Recognize that clients don't always know what value they seek – even though it may be clearly defined by needs requirements or SOW document– going forward it will include the need to evolve so that thought leadership can be demonstrated and directly benefit client in new ways.
  • Adopt a "democratization" strategy of bringing data/analytics to the key decision makers where the day-to-day operational decisions are made – and ensuring robustness in processes.
  • Recognize that data/analytics is most important to those making front-line decisions.

Foundations for implementing bigger digital strategies.

  • Executive buy-in at the most senior levels is a core need, as well as executives demonstrating through hands on engagement.
  • Integration of smart design, collaborative design and the adoption of a holistic approach.
  • A carefully orchestrated adoption plan is critical. Enable knowledge sharing and ensure literacy at the right levels by soliciting and engaging champions in all functional areas. They need to be the barometer of how things are progressing.
  • Keep concepts simple, easy to understand, accessible and usable. Less can be more, and mediocre adoption of highly complex digital strategies is much less effective than strong adoption of simpler to digest digital strategies.
  • Do not underestimate the effort of adoption – expect it to exceed the level of effort of deployment. Adoption is a continuous state of being – it is not a distinctive project.
  • Ensure there is a continuous learning and development plan on the path to self-sufficiency – otherwise internal champions stop championing.
  • Engagement in digital strategies is not the responsibility & ownership of one area/department, senior leadership need to ensure it permeates throughout the entire organization.

Register and view the webinar On-Demand here.

Register for this webcast.