By inviting evaluations of current services, firms create the opportunity to improve. As the Japanese manufacturers say, a “defect is a treasure.” In other words, by eagerly seeking out your “defects” and studying them carefully to identify why and how that performance failure occurred, you get the opportunity to improve. If you avoid feedback from … Read more

My observation of professional firms in general is that they tend to overinvest their non-billable practice development time in categories mentioned first on my list (broadcasting and courting) and, as a rule, under-invest in those activities lower on my list (superpleasing, nurturing, and listening). In large part, I have learned, this is because firms tend … Read more

In tackling the issue of staffing efficiency on engagements, no activity in the office surpasses in importance good management of the scheduling process. Once it has been decided how an engagement is to be staffed (who is assigned, and what portion of the engagement each is scheduled to do), the engagement’s leverage structure is in … Read more

While there clearly are a variety of personal factors at work (“I prefer to do it myself” or “I have more confidence it will be done correctly if I do it”), I have learned that a bigger explanation is provided by the measurement and reward systems of most firms (hence the name systemic under-delegation). First, … Read more

Imagine that a questionnaire was sent to each and every professional in your firm, top-to-bottom, asking the following single question: What percentage of your professional work time is spent doing things that a more junior person could do, if we got organized and trained the junior to handle it with quality? (Obviously, do not include … Read more

Productivity = Fees / Staff = Fees / hour * Hours / Staff = Value * Utilisation Excerpted from ‘Managing the Professional Service Firm’ by David Maister, page 33

Now consider a firm whose practice-mix was made up predominantly of clients who, rather than needing the profession’s most creative talent, wanted to find a firm that had accumulated experience in handling certain types of problems, and would not take an expensive “start with a blank sheet of paper” approach to the problem. The marketing … Read more

Imagine a professional practice group (or firm) that focuses its attention on serving the needs of clients with frontier problems. How would you run such a practice? True to the professions traditional self-image of being elite practitioners, the staffing requirements of this “expertise-based” practice would be such that the firm would need to seek out … Read more

In any professional service there are three key benefits that clients seek: expertise, experience, and efficiency. However, even within the same practice area, the relative priority that a given client places on these elements can vary dramatically. A client with a large, complex, high-risk, and unusual problem will appropriately seek out the most creative, talented, … Read more