Managing The Professional Service Firm - Softcover

Maister, David H.

 
9780684834313: Managing The Professional Service Firm
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0684834316 ISBN 13: 9780684834313
Verlag: Free Press, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

International expert and consultant David Maister offers a brilliant and accessible guide to every management issue at play in professional firms.

Professional firms differ from other business enterprises in two distinct ways: first, they provide highly customized services and thus cannot apply many of the management principles developed for product-based industries. Second, professional services are highly personalized, involving the skills of individuals. Such firms must therefore compete not only for clients but also for talented professionals.

Drawing on more than ten years of research and consulting to these unique and creative companies, David Maister explores issues ranging from marketing and business development to multinational strategies, human resources policies to profit improvement, strategic planning to effective leadership. While these issues can be complex, Maister simplifies them by recognizing that “every professional service firm in the world, regardless of size, specific profession, or country of operation, has the same mission statement: outstanding service to clients, satisfying careers for its people, and financial success for its owners.”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David H. Maister, one of the world's leading authorities on the management of professional service firms, is the author of several successful books, including Managing the Professional Service Firm, True Professionalism, and Practice What You Preach, and coauthor of The Trusted Advisor.

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CHAPTER 1

A QUESTION OF BALANCE

One of the most interesting discoveries in my consulting work has been the fact that (apparently) every professional service firm in the world has the same mission statement, regardless of the firm's size, specific profession, or country of operation. With varying refinements of language, the mission of most professional firms is:

To deliver outstanding client service; to provide fulfilling careers and professional satisfaction for our people; and to achieve financial success so that we can reward ourselves and grow.

The commonality of this mission does not detract from its value. Simply put, every professional firm must satisfy these three goals of "service, satisfaction, and success" if it is to survive. Management of a professional firm requires a delicate balancing act between the demands of the client marketplace, the realities of the people marketplace (the market for staff), and the firm's economic ambitions.

Many factors play a role in bringing these goals into harmony, but one has a preeminent position: the ratio of junior, middle-level, and senior staff in the firm's organization, referred to here as the firm's leverage. To see the importance of this factor, we shall briefly examine, in turn, its relation to the three goals of the firm.

LEVERAGE AND THE CLIENT MARKETPLACE

The required shape of the organization (the relative mix of juniors, managers, and seniors) is primarily determined by (or rather, as we shall see, should be determined by) the skill requirements of its work: the mix of senior-level, middle-level, and junior-level tasks involved in the projects that the firm undertakes. Consider three kinds of client work: Brains, Grey Hair, and Procedure projects.

In the first type (Brains), the client's problem is at the forefront of professional or technical knowledge, or at least is of extreme complexity. The key elements of this type of professional service are creativity, innovation, and the pioneering of new approaches, concepts or techniques: in effect, new solutions to new problems. The firm that targets this market will be attempting to sell its services on the basis of the high professional craft of its staff. In essence, their appeal to their market is, "Hire us because we're smart."

Brains projects usually involve highly skilled and highly paid professionals. Few procedures are routinizable: Each project is "one-off." Accordingly, the opportunities for leveraging the top professionals with juniors are relatively limited. Even though such projects may involve significant data collection and analysis activities (normally performed by juniors), even these activities cannot be clearly specified in advance and require the active involvement of at least middle-level (project management) professionals on a continuous basis. Consequently, the ratio of junior time to middle-level and senior time on Brains projects tends to be low.

Grey Hair projects, while they may require a highly customized "output" in meeting the clients' needs, involve a lesser degree of innovation and creativity in the actual performance of the work than would a Brains project. The general nature of the problem to be addressed is not unfamiliar, and the activities necessary to complete the project may be similar to those performed on other projects. Clients with Grey Hair problems seek out firms with experience in their particular type of problem. In turn, the firm sells its knowledge, its experience, and its judgment. In effect, they are saying, "Hire us because we have been through this before; we have practice at solving this type of problem."

Since for Grey Hair-type projects the problems to be addressed are somewhat more familiar, at least some of the tasks to be performed (particularly the early ones) are known in advance and can be specified and delegated. The opportunity is thus provided to employ more juniors to accomplish these tasks.

The third type of project, the Procedure project, usually involves a well-recognized and familiar type of problem. While there is still a need to customize to some degree, the steps necessary to accomplish this are somewhat programmatic. The client may have the ability and resources to perform the work itself, but turns to the professional firm because the firm can perform the service more efficiently, because the firm is an outsider, or because the client's own staff capabilities to perform the activity are somewhat constrained and are better used elsewhere. In essence, the professional firm is selling its procedures, its efficiency, its availability: "Hire us because we know how to do this and can deliver it effectively."

Procedure projects usually involve the highest proportion of junior time relative to senior time (and hence imply a different organizational shape for firms that specialize in such projects). The problems to be addressed in such projects, and the steps necessary to complete the analysis, diagnosis, and conclusions are usually so sufficiently well established that they can be easily delegated (under supervision) to junior staff. For Procedure projects the range of possible outcomes for some steps may be so well known that the appropriate responses may be "programmed."

The three categories described here are, of course, only points along a spectrum of project types. However, it is usually a simple task in any profession to identify types of problems that fit these categories. The choice that the firm makes in its mix of project types is one of the most important variables it has available to balance the firm. The choice of project types influences significantly, as we shall see, the economic and organizational structures of the firm.

Consider what will happen if a firm brings in a mix of client work such that its "proper" staffing requirements would be for a slightly higher mix of juniors, and a lesser mix of seniors than it has (i.e., the work is slightly more procedural than the firm would normally expect). What will happen?

As Figure 1-2 suggests, the short-run consequence will be that higher priced people will end up performing lower-value tasks (probably at lower fees), and there will be an underutilization of senior personnel. The firm will make less money than it should be making.

The opposite problem is no less real. If a firm brings in work that has skill requirements of a higher percentage of seniors and a lesser percentage of juniors, the consequences will be at least equally adverse: a shortfall of qualified staff to perform the tasks, and a consequent quality risk.

As these simple examples show, matching the skills required by the work to the skills available in the firm (i.e., managing the leverage structure) is central to keeping the firm in balance.

LEVERAGE AND THE PEOPLE MARKETPLACE

The connection between a firm's leverage structure (its ratio of junior to senior professional staff) and the people marketplace can be captured in a single sentence: People do not join professional firms for jobs, but for careers. They have strong expectations of progressing through the organization at some pace agreed to (explicitly or implicitly) in advance.

The professional service firm may be viewed as the modern embodiment of the medieval craftsman's shop, with its apprentices, journeymen, and master craftsmen. The early years of an individual's association with a professional service firm are, indeed, usually viewed as an apprenticeship, and the relation between juniors and seniors the same: The senior craftsmen repay the hard work and assistance of the juniors by teaching them their craft.

The archetypal structure of the professional service firm is an organization containing three professional levels. In a consulting organization, these levels might be...

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Verlag
Free Press
Erscheinungsdatum
1997
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0684834316
ISBN 13 
9780684834313
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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