“This is how we always did it” is no longer a valid approach to planning how you scale delivery.
I get it, heads of Professional Services in B2B SaaS businesses are busy, very busy. The time you blocked in the morning to work quietly on improvements was triple-booked by 8:15am, and you still need to deal with the get-better plan from the last escalation. You recall your strategic ideas in the shower before bed and make a mental note to work on them next week, and this was 3 weeks ago.
It’s often easier to simply keep doing the same thing that we did before.
I wrote about this before – in most organisations PS is a cost centre and companies try hard to reduce the related costs.
- Lower costs → less people.
- Less people → more work for the teams.
- More customer work → less time for strategic initiatives.
And the head of PS is expected to function within these parameters.
Something needs to change.
So what can you do?
↦ You may need someone to spend the time that you don’t have to dig deep, and understand the challenges. Someone fully focused, someone with no distractions.
↦ You may need someone to analyse the findings and suggest strategic solutions. Someone with industry experience, and an external perspective.
There’s good adrenaline in being a hero, but there is an even bigger reward for stepping back, making brave decisions, and collaborating to create a scalable and sustainable operating model for PS.