I've been transitioning some of the operational parts of the business to our team lead. This has given me reason to review the tools I use to manage the Professional Services organization. There's one tool that I use above all others - something I pick up many times in the same hour even when I'm not in the office.
I thought about our old customer survey process in the course of preparing for upcoming staff reviews. The old process consisted of sending a customer a short email and a link to a five question survey. If the customer hadn't replied within a week, we sent them a reminder about the survey. The email addressed the customer by name and included my phone number in case the customer wanted to speak to me. The customer survey used the Netflix rating system, which is a five point rating scale ranging from "I hated it," to "I loved it." This isn't a unique process. We recently chose to replace it with a process we feel will be more effective.
Scheduling new Professional Services engagements is a major area of focus for an effective Professional Services Manager. Consultants don’t typically like extended downtime between customers, and customers rarely want to wait for their engagement to start. I’ve stripped the scheduling process to the bare minimum, which is a stark contrast to how I’ve seen other Services Managers historically conduct this job function.
A fundamental engineering tenet is that, “you get what you measure”. I’ve worked in both sales and engineering organizations, and my experience is that sales organizations are more consistent and effective at their implementation.
The team I support deals in matters of regulatory and security compliance. We have specific competencies in privilege management and auditing of privileged users. It's an honor to be the trusted advisors to Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies.
My colleagues produce art, and I apply engineering methods to measure that art. This simple discipline has become part of our staff retention efforts.
A consultant typically has a simple set of tools to work with. They might have a basic template for a document that they will prepare for a client, or some template illustrations that can be re-used across clients. In the hands of the untrained practitioner, these templates might seem like a simple exercise of filling in the blanks on a form, or re-arranging box and line illustrations. The consultant uses these basic tools only as a guideline, alongside a series of conversations or workshops with customers. Those conversations are an inherently artistic, creative process - to use the existing tools and their individual experience to create something new for a client.
Recruiting is one of the continuing responsibilities for me at work. Lately, I’ve been looking into expanding into new markets of candidates outside of the smart people that I know on LinkedIn. I support two Air Force veterans and a former SEAL on my team, although that’s not a population I’ve specifically recruited.