ServiceLine White Papers

Geographic Diversity and Fragmented Teams -
The New Professional Services Paradigm

- by Jeffrey M. Kaplan, Managing Director of THINKstrategies

A combination of changing customer demands, escalating competitive pressures, increasing geographic diversity, and rapidly advancing technological innovation are fundamentally changing how Professional Services Organizations are managed.

The days of a highly centralized workforce performing their jobs within the four walls of a traditional workplace are a thing of the past for most businesses. The nature of work is fundamentally changing and the way workers are managed must also change.

While this phenomenon may seem obvious to many, nearly every organization is still trying to contend with the management challenges created by an increasingly dispersed and often mobile workforce.

These challenges include implementing a proper goal-setting, activity tracking, performance monitoring and project reporting process for workers who can no longer be managed on a daily basis face-to-face. It also requires new methods of communicating and coordinating work across a fragmented team.

Traditional, on-premise software is not designed to address these challenges. These legacy applications are dependent on direct local area network (LAN) connections within a centralized location, or a virtual private network (VPN) link through a corporate firewall for remote workers. These technical limitations are also too costly to support the more fluid movements inside and outside traditional offices of today's workers. SaaS Solutions, on the other hand, address all of these challenges, and as a result, are becoming the new de facto standard for Services Organizations that must manage a constantly changing pool of geographically diverse employees, partners, and subcontractors.

SaaS Solutions, on the other hand, address all of these challenges, and as a result, are becoming the new de facto standard for Services Organizations that must manage a constantly changing pool of geographically diverse employees, partners, and subcontractors.

Competition, Geographic Diversity, and the Changing Nature of Services

As the business world becomes more global, it is also becoming more competitive. The lowering of geographic borders is not only opening up new markets for business growth, it is also lowering the barrier to entry in nearly every industry sector.

This is attracting a proliferation of new players who are often trying to win a share of the market by offering lower cost products or services. This price competition is forcing many businesses to work harder to win and retain customers. It is also creating budgetary pressures for many businesses who are trying to manage their operating costs.

At the same time, technology innovations have enabled businesses to push more of their workers into the field and have allowed other employees to work from home. Mobile devices are becoming increasingly powerful and economical. The cost of desktops and laptops continues to drop. And, the availability of broadband networks, both wired and wireless, is becoming more pervasive.

The number of mobile workers in the U.S. is expected to reach more than 70% of the country's total workforce by 2009, according to IDC. Korn/Ferry International reports that over four out of five (81%) executives worldwide are constantly connected to their businesses via mobile devices.

These workers are not only able to meet with customers and corporate partners on a face-to-face basis, but perform their job functions in a more flexible fashion. These benefits have led to a significant improvement in their job satisfaction as well. A survey of approximately 10,000 U.S. workers conducted in June 2007 by the Kenexa Research Institute, a unit of Kenexa, a recruitment and retention consulting firm, found that workers who telecommute, either from home or another remote location, have higher satisfaction levels and are more loyal to their companies.

Nearly three quarters (73%) of the remote and home-based workers surveyed reported they are satisfied with their company as a place to work compared with less than two-thirds (64%) of employees still working in corporate offices.

The Challenges of Managing Fragmented Teams

However, job satisfaction and company loyalty don't necessarily translate into greater employee productivity and corporate profits. Achieving these corporate objectives requires solid management and reliable automation tools.

Home-based and mobile workers who are responsible for ongoing sales and service functions must have access to enterprise applications from anywhere, at any time. If this anytime access is unavailable, the remote workers are unable to enter or access important customer data. The absence of an effective service automation application could delay their response to customer requests or result in costly duplication of effort within a company.

Home-based or mobile employees, and their managers, can also be frustrated if they cannot effectively coordinate projects from their remote locations. Without the right project management application, it can be difficult to make and track project assignments. It can also be harder to ensure that deadlines are met and budgets are adhered to across a fragmented team.

These service automation and project management challenges are compounded when third-party or offshore resources are involved. These outside employees must be given special access to a company's enterprise applications via a costly VPN connection that could also require making a hole in the corporate firewall that can create security and compliance problems for companies.

Traditional enterprise applications are not only difficult to access from outside the firewall, they are also cumbersome to use in many cases. Rather than being designed to mirror the actual business processes to ensure their ease of use, most legacy applications were designed to operate with a highly structured database and operating system environment on top of inflexible hardware platform. This rigid design also made the enterprise applications of the past difficult to modify to meet the changing needs of a company and its employees, or its customers and partners.

These shortcomings have led many companies, and their employees, to under-utilize their legacy applications. The employees are discouraged because these applications are difficult to access remotely and take too long to use. The result is they fail to fully utilize the applications and document their activity, and the company is unable to track their work and productivity.

This translates into lower return on their software investments (ROI), with a higher total cost of ownership (TCO) trying to keep these complex applications up and running. For public companies, this could also create compliance issues.

SaaS Solutions Enable the PSO to Address Today’s Management Challenges

Web-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions are designed to leverage the power of the Internet and support the real-life workflow of businesses. This means remote and mobile workers can access SaaS solutions 'on-demand' via a standard browser from anywhere at anytime.

The user interface for these applications is also more user-friendly, intuitive and easy to use. These attributes encourage workers to more fully utilize the SaaS solution than the legacy applications of the past. Greater utilization means a higher ROI.

SaaS-based Professional Services Automation (PSA) and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) solutions should include project planning, resource management, status tracking, financial controls and reporting capabilities. These web-based applications enable managers and the project team members to clearly set objectives, assign responsibilities, monitor progress, identify issues, and measure their results on a real-time basis.

Internet access means that remote workers are no longer at the mercy of VPNs or corporate firewalls as they do their day-to-day work. Instead, they can easily report their progress on projects and see how their teammates are doing as well. The anytime/anywhere access also encourages greater communication and collaboration among team members. It also permits a manager to quickly redirect the team if corporate policies or the competitive climate dictates.

The ease of use of these SaaS-based solutions encourages employees to use the applications on a more consistent basis to make sure that critical customer and other corporate data is up to date, and they comply with corporate policies.

These web-based applications can also be reconfigured by system administrators, and other authorized personnel within a company, to respond to changing requirements. Unlike legacy applications which required specialized expertise and experience to be customized to meet a company's needs, SaaS-based solutions are architected to permit simple reconfigurations.

An equally important benefit of SaaS-based solutions is their speed to value.

Traditional, on-premise applications often took months, if not years, to deploy; additional servers and other hardware and software systems to support; and a team of dedicated staff to keep the applications up and running.

SaaS solutions can be deployed in days or weeks, depending on the complexity of the business. A web-based application is hosted by the SaaS vendor and does not require additional hardware or software, or a dedicated staff to support it. And, the user-friendly interface associated with SaaS solutions reduces the training required and accelerates end-user adoption cycles.

The net result is that companies can deploy and utilize SaaS-based Services Automation and PPM solutions more quickly, economically and effectively than with traditional licensed offerings – and the PSO's adopting these solutions today will be more agile and effective, and thus well positioned to capitalize on the continually growing services market in the years to come.