Managing the Professional Services Firm

This article was written in July 2004, and is a manifesto for change in Sun. In passing the article reviews and borrows from David Maister’s book, “Managing the Professional Services Firm“. I copied it across to this blog in 2015. It still reads as a manifesto, which was ignored.  I suggest, its remaining relevance is based on insights I hope still stand to be repeated. In summary, Consultants offer Expertise, the ability to invent and solve problems for the first time, Experience, the promise of having done it before or Efficiency, a cost promise based having done the thing many times. These propositions have different values to customers, overselling is hard and will be resented. Organisations will find it hard, Maister argues impossible to optimise for all of these propositions. …