Table of

Contents
01. Introduction
03. The Project is a Living Plan
05. The Project is Your Proposal
07. The Project is a Workspace
09. The Project is Your Network
12. The Project is a Profit & Loss
15. About the Author

01.

INTRODUCTION

If you deliver a professional service, the

world in which you conduct business is
undergoing rapid transformation. The
pressures are more intense, your margins
are being squeezed, and its very difficult
to win and keep business.

Project work is fast becoming the way of

business. While this means there is
greater demand for your firms services,
there has also been an explosion of
competitors as the workforce has begun a

Todays competitive, global environment is

multi-year shift to external provider

dictating a new norm. The world has

ecosystems.

flattened and alternative, less costly

geographies for producing goods and
delivering services have become more
accessible. Organizations are reducing
full-time employee headcount, and
increasing their reliance on outside
contractors and outsourced vendors to
deliver work. In the average business
today, more than 30% of the workforce is
outside of the company, and that is
expected to reach 40% by 2020.

Eamonn Kelly, the Chief Marketing Officer

at Deloitte, captured the shift well in a
recent report Business Ecosystems Come of
Age: Ecosystems today are doing nothing
less than redefining the shape and
structure of the economy. They are
increasingly determining business success
and business failure. They are enabling
massive and rapid innovation around the
world. They are playing a very, very
critical role in shaping the future of our
society.

Source: Deloitte University Press, April 15, 2015, http://dupress.com/articles/business-ecosystems-come-of-age-business-trends/

Interview via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbNx2ltM7yE

Working in these new ecosystems is complex, and has introduced a new reality for you:

VIRTUAL OFFICES
Work must be delivered in open and collaborative environments, and you need to
facilitate much more complex coordination of expertise and activities from across
the globe.

02.

VIRTUAL TEAMS
You need to deploy and activate large groups of people from both inside and outside
the organization, that you neither own nor control.

TRANSPARENCY & VISIBILITY

Clients are infinitely more sophisticated at managing outside providers and
have increased expectations around how you work, and how much you
charge. This puts pressure on your margins.

To win, a new mindset and a new approach

services organizations of the future.

are required. You need to rethink your

Whether you are a consulting firm, IT

business from the ground up. Your success

services organization, marketing

depends on your ability to deliver

agency, property management firm, or

predictability and profitability, with

other professional service, you will

visibility, control and confidence.

want to understand these five trends

To help facilitate this transition, project

management technology is evolving
rapidly and the project is becoming a
dynamic platform to run professional

that can help make your business

infinitely scalable. Grasping these
concepts will help you to adapt to
changing business conditions and help
propel your business for years to come.

03.

THE PROJECT IS
A LIVING PLAN

Planning, of course, is where the project

allows a plan to evolve on a daily basis if

begins. In the past, the process involved a

need-be. Project teams must work through

project manager utilizing templates or

the barrage of new incoming information

software to create a project plan, and then

and unexpected turns on a continual basis.

disseminating it to the team for execution.

Done and shared, we were on our way.

Project stakeholders need to be able to

view the current status of the project plan

The plan can no longer be a static thing.

and update tasks and timelines in real

Its alive and constantly being reshaped in

time.

reaction to variables that change

throughout the life of the project. The
speed and compressed nature of business
today requires a fluidity of structure that

Agility and speed are required to execute projects in

todays fast paced business environment, and each
of these rely on project clarity to happen clarity
around things like:

What needs to be done

Who needs to do it
With what help and review
By when
With what budget
Under what constraints and dependencies

With project clarity, every stakeholder in the plan feels more agile, better aligned with the team,
and more accountable, regardless of how the plan evolves. The point here is the project is now a
plan one that is alive in a way that is shareable, distributed, assigned, owned, understood, and
accessible across your entire network of stakeholders.

04.

05.

THE PROJECT IS
YOUR PROPOSAL

Despite technological advances in

satisfying the needs of their client while

professional services bid and project

meeting profitability targets, one project at

management software, the synergy between

time.

a companys sales organization and its

delivery organization is often still broken.
Why? Sales process is handled in one system,
proposals in another, and the project in yet
another.

Project technology is evolving to support

these needs and help professional
organizations turn projects into proposals.
Instead of jumping from system to system,
the project plan can serve as a proposal, and

The resulting challenges usually come in the

adjustments to the proposal are made within

form of misalignment between the sales

the plan theyre one and the same. Your

proposal and the execution plan, duplicate

global, extended workforce and their

work going from system to system as the

associated rates and availability, are all

proposal is completed, and duplicate work as

available within your project management

adjustments are made to the proposal and

application, which means fewer steps to

project once the client provides feedback. If

build proposals and deliver engagements

misalignment persists through project start,

with confidence. Once you get the buyer to

another negative outcome is less than desired

yes and they are ready to begin the project,

margins. Most professional services

you will be able to hit the start button

businesses need to relook at their proposal

immediately because the proposal is built

management processes to try and eliminate

from the project plan and the plan has

these issues, keeping a universal focus on

already been built.

By using your project plan as the proposal, they

will mirror each other, and help you better:

Plan and execute in an efficient manner

More predictably meet your margins
Manage customer expectations
Fulfill those expectations
Provide transparency
And manage change throughout
the customer lifecycle

The benefits abound from there.

06.

07.

THE PROJECT IS
A WORKSPACE

The concept of an online venue in which to

These new workspaces mimic the physical

meet for work purposes is a relatively

workplace and interactions, and the same

recent trend, yet its one that is

needs for privacy and permissions,

accelerating at lightning speed. As a

information sharing and visibility, alignment,

professional, you probably expect there to

messaging, and project management still

be an online destination where you can at

apply.

least go to share files or collaborate with

others. Expectations are growing quickly,
technology is evolving just as fast, and the
workplace is changing in front of your eyes.
The workplace is becoming a virtual
workspace.

A bulk of project management technology

today was originally built for the professional
project manager, and did a poor job of
integrating and accommodating external and
remote constituents who were tasked with
delivering an outcome. Traditionally missing

Where collaboration used to be facilitated

from consideration has been the commercial

through blocks of cubicles, conference

relationship that exists among parties

rooms, email, and conference calls, you

providers, your supply chain, and your clients.

now have a virtual container that houses

Technology is finally taking real-world

the activity, the communication, the

requirements for project management and

deliverables, the proposals, the finances,

applying them to the capabilities of an online

and even the virtual personalities of the

workspace. The degree to which you can

people involved.

mimic these real world scenarios will help

The concept of an online venue

in which to meet for work
purposes is a relatively recent
trend, yet its one that is
accelerating at lightning speed.08.

people to embrace the change.

In todays business world, your clients require
transparency. Clients want to validate the work
that has been done on their behalf for which they
are paying. They want more details. They want to
build a trusted relationship. Your project as a
virtual workspace is the answer to these demands,
and thankfully, its now at your disposal and
something that many early adopters are already
deploying as a competitive advantage.

09.

THE PROJECT IS
YOUR NETWORK

TechCrunch contributor James Currier has

remain the same. Over time, nearly all

analyzed the recent 5-year emergence of

independent professionals and their

market networks, which combine the

clients will conduct business through the

transactional nature of a marketplace with

market network of their industry. Were

the identity and communication

just seeing the beginning of it now. Market

capabilities of a network.

networks will have a massive positive

You can imagine a market network for

every industry where professionals are not
interchangeable: law, travel, real estate,
media production, architecture,
investment banking, personal finance,
construction, management consulting and
more. Each market network will have
different attributes that make it work in
each vertical, but the principles will

impact on how millions of people work and

live, and how hundreds of millions of
people buy better services.

This collaborative and transactional socialization of the

workspace will continue to build towards an inherent
network inside your projects. New people from all over
the world will increasingly be brought into your
projects in the form of:

Internal talent
External service providers
Freelancers
Technology specialists
Clients

Your project networks will expand into expertise groups and evolve into a means to more
dynamically locate and leverage talent. This is increasingly important and necessary because of
the speed at which you are asked to get work done.

10.

11.

Today, more than 30% of the US

workforce is comprised of
independent service
professionals, totalling
approximately 40 million people
The extent to which you find and source

external, yet need to execute to your

this talent at speed will be critical to your

standards, as a representative of your

projects success. In order to make the best

brand.

choices and the right business decisions to

help you get your work done, you will need
a trusted global network accessible within
and connected to your projects. The
demand for specialized skill sets will only
increase in the coming years, and trusted
providers will have the resources available
to deliver on client needs. Your networks
will be an invaluable, wholly integrated
means of doing business, and trust will be

Five years from now this is the way

business will all be working. Ten years
from now, every company will have a
network of this sort. They will be robust,
proactive and trustworthy. New ways of
identifying the right specialists to meet
your needs will be clear and easy.
Procurement will be as much a part of
these project networks as the people.

equally important within the network of a

provider as more and more of the team
executing on a given project will be

Source: Crunch Network From Social Networks to Market Networks, June 27, 2015 by James Currier
http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/27/from-social-to-market-networks/

12.

THE PROJECT IS
A PROFIT & LOSS

The best run services companies have

Technology is evolving to support this

learned to run every project as a Profit

approach, eliminating the need for the

and Loss statement (P&L). Accenture,

overwhelming number of

one of the most successful and

spreadsheets and disparate systems

profitable professional services firms on

required to track project activity and

the planet, gets this right, and its core

manage your business. The days are

to how they operate. Projects are

gone when you need to wait weeks or

becoming your day-to-day work, and if

even months for your accounting team

you can manage them as a P&L with a

to communicate project margins and

specific margin target, you will have the

results.

real-time ability to predict outcomes

and respond to changing business
dynamics.

13. Technology

Connecting the Dots.

Todays technology delivers in a single application the tight coupling of all the necessary business
components required to manage every dimension of project delivery in real-time, with a
contextualized experience for all participants:

Task and Timelines

Resource Availability and Utilization
Time and Expense
Budget and Margin Control
Project-Level Accounting
Figure 01.1

14.
By leveraging the concept of distributed
accountability, you can confidentially
scale your business to literally any size
you want.

In todays high-performing companies, project

Fortunately, its possible to manage business

managers are also profit managers. To effectively

this way today, and for every single project

deliver the results expected, you must have the

P&L to roll up into your overall business. By

visibility and the tools at your disposal to know

leveraging the concept of distributed

what your margins are and the ability to predict

accountability, you can confidentially scale

financial performance of every project.

your business to literally any size you want.

15.

ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
Ray Grainger, co-founder and CEO of
Mavenlink, is a recognized and
awarded expert in technology and
services delivery. He honed his
expertise as a global managing partner
at Accenture, where he helped
organizations such as Apple, 3M, Sony
and Oracle work smarter and more
profitably. Ray founded Mavenlink to
help professional services companies
grow by combining technology and
industry best practices.