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
Project work is fast becoming the way of
undergoing rapid transformation. The
business. While this means there is
pressures are more intense, your margins
greater demand for your firms services,
are being squeezed, and its very difficult
there has also been an explosion of
to win and keep business.
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
Eamonn Kelly, the Chief Marketing Officer
geographies for producing goods and
at Deloitte, captured the shift well in a
delivering services have become more
recent report Business Ecosystems Come of
accessible. Organizations are reducing
Age: Ecosystems today are doing nothing
full-time employee headcount, and
less than redefining the shape and
increasing their reliance on outside
structure of the economy. They are
contractors and outsourced vendors to
increasingly determining business success
deliver work. In the average business
and business failure. They are enabling
today, more than 30% of the workforce is
massive and rapid innovation around the
outside of the company, and that is
world. They are playing a very, very
expected to reach 40% by 2020.
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
are required. You need to rethink your
business from the ground up. Your success
depends on your ability to deliver
predictability and profitability, with
visibility, control and confidence.
To help facilitate this transition, project
management technology is evolving
rapidly and the project is becoming a
dynamic platform to run professional
services organizations of the future.
Whether you are a consulting firm, IT
services organization, marketing
agency, property management firm, or
other professional service, you will
want to understand these five trends
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.
Project stakeholders need to be able to
Done and shared, we were on our way.
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:

04.
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.
05. THE PROJECT IS
YOUR PROPOSAL
Despite technological advances in
professional services bid and project
management software, the synergy between
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.
The resulting challenges usually come in the
form of misalignment between the sales
proposal and the execution plan, duplicate
work going from system to system as the
proposal is completed, and duplicate work as
adjustments are made to the proposal and
project once the client provides feedback. If
misalignment persists through project start,
another negative outcome is less than desired
margins. Most professional services
businesses need to relook at their proposal
management processes to try and eliminate
these issues, keeping a universal focus on
satisfying the needs of their client while
meeting profitability targets, one project at
time.
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
adjustments to the proposal are made within
the plan theyre one and the same. Your
global, extended workforce and their
associated rates and availability, are all
available within your project management
application, which means fewer steps to
build proposals and deliver engagements
with confidence. Once you get the buyer to
yes and they are ready to begin the project,
you will be able to hit the start button
immediately because the proposal is built
from the project plan and the plan has
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 06.

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.

07. THE PROJECT IS
A WORKSPACE
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. As a
professional, you probably expect there to
be an online destination where you can at
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.
Where collaboration used to be facilitated
through blocks of cubicles, conference
rooms, email, and conference calls, you
now have a virtual container that houses
the activity, the communication, the
deliverables, the proposals, the finances,
and even the virtual personalities of the
people involved.
These new workspaces mimic the physical
workplace and interactions, and the same
needs for privacy and permissions,
information sharing and visibility, alignment,
messaging, and project management still
apply.
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
from consideration has been the commercial
relationship that exists among parties
providers, your supply chain, and your clients.
Technology is finally taking real-world
requirements for project management and
applying them to the capabilities of an online
workspace. The degree to which you can
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
impact on how millions of people work and
You can imagine a market network for
live, and how hundreds of millions of
every industry where professionals are not
people buy better services.
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
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:

10.
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.
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
Five years from now this is the way
help you get your work done, you will need
business will all be working. Ten years
a trusted global network accessible within
from now, every company will have a
and connected to your projects. The
network of this sort. They will be robust,
demand for specialized skill sets will only
proactive and trustworthy. New ways of
increase in the coming years, and trusted
identifying the right specialists to meet
providers will have the resources available
your needs will be clear and easy.
to deliver on client needs. Your networks
Procurement will be as much a part of
will be an invaluable, wholly integrated
these project networks as the people.
means of doing business, and trust will be
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/
THE PROJECT IS
A PROFIT & LOSS
The best run services companies have
learned to run every project as a Profit
and Loss statement (P&L). Accenture,
one of the most successful and
profitable professional services firms on
the planet, gets this right, and its core
to how they operate. Projects are
becoming your day-to-day work, and if
you can manage them as a P&L with a
specific margin target, you will have the
real-time ability to predict outcomes
and respond to changing business
dynamics.
12.
Technology is evolving to support this
approach, eliminating the need for the
overwhelming number of
spreadsheets and disparate systems
required to track project activity and
manage your business. The days are
gone when you need to wait weeks or
even months for your accounting team
to communicate project margins and
results.
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

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
managers are also profit managers. To effectively
deliver the results expected, you must have the
visibility and the tools at your disposal to know
what your margins are and the ability to predict
financial performance of every project.
14.
Fortunately, its possible to manage business
this way today, and for every single project
P&L to roll up into your overall business. By
leveraging the concept of distributed
accountability, you can confidentially scale
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.