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. …

Dave Levy, Online at last

This is the mirror of my first post at blogs.sun.com …. Hi! – Friends such as Alex Muffet & Jon Haslem have persuaded me to open this web log. This initial entry is not going to set the world on fire, but some of the changes at Sun both encourage the premature expression of ideas, but make the publication of more complete thoughts more difficult, hopefully, they’ll fix the latter problem some time, but I propose to take advantage of the former at this site. …