Who Should Attend?

  • IT Service Providers
  • Consulting Firms
  • Engineering and Architecture Firms
  • Anyone delivering projects…

Why Repeatable Processes Matter

  • The Challenge: Inefficiencies, delays, and inconsistent outcomes often result from unstandardized onboarding processes.
  • The Solution: Discover how repeatable processes drive scalability, enhance client satisfaction, and boost profitability.
  • Real-World Insights: Hear success stories from organizations that transformed their operations with standardized workflows.

Key Elements of Effective Professional Services Implementation

  • Establishing clear milestones and deliverables to track progress effectively.
  • Utilizing templates, playbooks, and workflows to save time and reduce errors.
  • Building scalable resource plans to manage team capacity efficiently.

Best Practices for Client Onboarding

  • Balancing personalization and standardization to meet unique client needs while maintaining efficiency.
  • Ensuring alignment through mutual success plans that outline goals and responsibilities.
  • Measuring success by tracking KPIs and refining processes based on feedback and results.

This webinar will equip you with actionable strategies to streamline your operations, improve team productivity, and deliver exceptional client experiences.

Transcript: 

00:00 – 00:30

Joseph Knecht: Introduction

Quick background.  Joey Knecht, one of the senior leaders with Proteus - Proteus Engage - one of our flagship products. I've been with the enterprise 24 years. I’ve seen a lot of things work and seen a lot of things not work. We're going to focus on the things that work.  I appreciate everybody's time here and on Tuesday. Awesome.  let's get started.

[00:30] Screen showing slide: The Complexity of B2B Project Execution 

00:31 – 03:24

Joseph Knecht: The Complexity of B2B Project Execution

The reason why you're here is many of you, probably, are in some sort of B2B business that is delivering professional services of some type. Those professional services can be contracts for consulting, or it can be other types of services - we really don't care here; when we say professional services, we mean anything that you're delivering to a client -custom development, to consulting, to projects. It really doesn't matter to us. A lot of our clients have some element of professional services, if not all professional services. We also have clients that deliver professional services, and some products. Then we have clients that also deliver software, right? A lot of these delivery mechanisms we try to align with professional services. 

And I encourage you. Obviously, as we go through these, to think about your own environment and some of the challenges you've had. But I always like to start a little bit with just the overarching complexity of what's going on.  And if any of you on this call are over 35, maybe 40, you know that this has just metastasized dramatically.

Just with the number of people, corporate governance, siloing - not only within your own organization - but silos in the client organization. And it just exacerbates a lot of challenges and problems with professional delivery services. Or again, project delivery.  we're going to walk through these. 

These are just high level - it's camp-run-amok. Right? More people, more money, more problems. The larger the dollar of the project, the more problems you're going to have. The higher expectations and just all the potential pitfalls that can kind of come through that, right? 

Many of our clients are dealing with these challenges. Because you're just dealing with humans, and you're dealing with expectations. And there's a lot of potential areas where this can go wrong. And we’re going to share it with you - I think I said five or the team said five in the thing - I think we're actually going to go through six. And probably more than that, as I continue to go here. 

But your environment probably looks something like this (indicates the screen). Here on the left-hand side, is yourself and then the client side, and lots of different stakeholders, lots of different opinions, lots of different expectations.  And quite frankly, everybody wants it on demand also.  they want real time feedback and access, which is frequently a challenge on these projects.  one, it's understanding the environment, right? All of you live in this environment, I assume. This is heavily prevalent in business. And so –

[03:24] Screen showing slide: Common Pitfalls on Delivery 

03:25 – 07:05

Joseph Knecht: Common Pitfalls on Delivery

What I want to do next is more of a self-evaluation. And what I just realized on the screen is this black lettering does not jive really well with this slide - but hopefully you can see here. This is a homework assignment for everybody on this call. And these are the common pitfalls in PS delivery and some of the challenges around that. There are two slides that I'm going to go through with these common pitfalls. And I want you, from your own purview, to write down just what challenges are happening within your group. 

We will talk about delivery here. Obviously, the concept and the topic is about delivery, and we call it onboarding or implementation. 

“Poorly Defined Scope”

But a lot of times you had no chance from the start. A lot of times the project was poorly defined. And maybe that's not your organization. But we have had many clients that have really, really struggled making sure the actual scope and expectations were effectively managed during the sales process before getting into it. Some of you might be chuckling. Maybe that's every project in your group that is that way. Some of you are like, never heard that, Joe. Congrats! But we see that. You'll see that if you've been on our website. One of the resources we see a lot of success with is that onboarding or project delivery begins in the last 25% of the actual sales. Because it really does, often times, in professional services and other contracts. It's because at that point you're really doing the definition and figuring it all out. And I'll speak a little bit more about that.  you might actually have a problem before you're even getting to the delivery. 

“Inadequate Client Onboarding”

Then a lot of clients have, let's call it ad hoc client onboarding. And we see that extensively. Some of the reasons behind that are that every project we do is different kind of methodology.  Which we would call false because it's not true. The expectations of your customers are actually pretty consistent. I don't care how you do your business. It's more the customer’s expectations that matter. And filling that delta, right?

“Misalignment Between Sales and Delivery Team”

Again, it's a misalignment between the sales and delivery team. This would be the hidden way of saying handoffs.  looking at your organization and the services you're providing, if you're not a sole proprietor or a sole contributor, or a very, very small team, you might have no handoff issues - you might be involved the entire time. But a lot of our clients have different teams. And when you have different teams, and if it's a larger project or a more complicated project, there are a lot of expectations woven into that. And the last thing you want clients to do is retell their whole story, their needs, their problems, their wants, their desires for you again.  if that's you, mark that out.

“Weak Project Governance”

Weak governance is something about setting expectations. I'll talk a lot about that. We want to make sure there are clear roles and everything.

“Insufficient Resource Allocation”

Resource allocation. You might be asking, Joe, what does that have to do with this? I'll talk about that more about one of the solutions being mutual plans and holding people accountable. And pre-mortems, which is predicting failure before failure happens. Which is extremely important for a lot of our clients and bodes very successful. So again, on this first list, jot down what might be affecting you. 

[07:06] Screen showing slide: More to Consider… 

07:06 – 12:35

Joseph Knecht: More to Consider…

“Lack of Stakeholder Engagement”

Do you have a lack of engagement post-sale, meaning when you send an email, they kind of go to Never Neverland. And basically, there's no clear visibility. That's a big problem for a lot of groups. 

“Communication Breakdowns”

Communication breakdowns again. Mark these down if these are part of the challenges you're having.

“Incomplete or Poor Data/File Sharing/Migration”

For some of our clients - which it's more and more every day - usually there's some sort of data transfer that has to happen, meaning during the sales process for definition. When you're delivering your services, whatever it might be, having no consistent way of moving data back and forth or sharing things securely. A lot of you are probably dealing with regulated industries, banks, hospitals, finance. Quite frankly, every industry right now is regulated industry, and so security is a big thing.  you better not be sharing all of this confidential information via email. Email is not secure - it creates all sorts of problems.  you have to think about that from the data access perspective, corporate governance of your own company liability, and also from the client side.  data management or data aggregation. Again, mark it down.

“Unclear Success Metrics”

Unclear metrics - I don't know if any of you have experienced this. We hear this. There's a project going on, and there really is no clear measuring of ROI in the beginning phases. Like, how are we going to determine success on this project? And how do we hold people accountable to that? That's a big thing. Think about that on your projects.
We call it the ‘Mission Critical 120’ - which is 120 days after the delivery of your project or service. How do you score? Where are you at?  How do you justify the investment? How do you show trend lines to that investment and in professional services? This is really critical. It's critical. Obviously, in software delivery and product delivery, but a lot of times in consulting projects - you name it. The clients are testing you.

And your delivery of that first project - if it's a new client to you - is really the make or break of the LTV (lifetime value) of that client to you. If that goes Willy Wonka, your chances of getting other projects for them dramatically drop off. And a lot of times, how that's delivered is obviously an ROI or whatever the target problem you were solving. Right? People just don't do things. Companies just don't do things to do. They do things to solve problems or create opportunities. How are you effectively measuring that in your delivery? And then, how are you sharing that back with the stakeholders that paid for it? It's a real big thing – real, real big thing.

“Failure to Anticipate Risks”

And then another one to consider, for you, is failure to anticipate the risks.  Kind of just meandering into projects, kind of the rigmarole. I'll talk about this, because this is where you get your classic Johari windows. Where you didn't see the risk coming. And how we anticipate that with a lot of our clients is having a structure of how you do a lot of this stuff, so that you can help unearth these and address those problems before they kind of smack you when you when you didn't see it coming.

These are just pitfalls. Okay?  in Project PS, we see that these are frequently a common set of areas that individuals are struggling with. And then that permeates delays or other problems. Right? These are just the core problems around that.

You know the symptoms you'll get from this are people slow to react, slow to respond, projects dying on the vine, and no one caring right? Those are all just symptoms. Like, these are the true problems that are about behind those. Right? We're being ghosted. We're not getting paid. The list gets pretty big. And the root cause – Eastern/Western medicine on this kind of stuff - the root cause is typically around these types of things. 

So again, I encourage everybody here on these last two slides, and of course I will share this deck with you after it. It's kind of like a scorecard, quite frankly. And if you go through it and you’re candid – which is one of our values in our company and one of our engagements with our clients. We always talk about it in order for us to really knock this out of the park for you and make this scalable, make this repeatable, I truly need to know your problems.

We can help you solve those, and we can commit to making you successful.  a lot of it is really breaking these down and not just saying we're good there. Because even if you're good, you could get better, right? You could scale it, it could be more automated, it could be higher touch. So again, these are the common pitfalls. All right. Hopefully, everybody took those to heart. And again, I will share these with you later.

[12:35] Screen showing slide: 5+ Strategies to Simplify Client Implementation 

12:36 – 18:14

Joseph Knecht: 5+ Strategies to Simplify Client Implementation

The tagline for this webinar was, you know, 5 Strategies. I'm actually going to give you six. And I'm actually going to just show you something, some real-world use cases of this. Because I always feel people learn in different ways. There's the dialogue here, but then sometimes, seeing is believing. And again, I don't know any of you. And a lot of this is just giving you the ideas and allowing you to reverse engineer that into your environment. And on every webinar, I always offer a free conversation.

You know, just with me - not selling. Just literally, complain about your challenges or the opportunities and I provide feedback to you, based on our ridiculous amount of experience and success here.  the strategies. This is 3 on this deck and 3 on the next one. So again, encouraging you to think about these and identify, maybe, some gaps on your side. And then I'll actually walk through these.

“Enhance Communication and Transparency”

Number one problem, most of the time, is enhanced communication and transparency as to what is going on. With the plethora of stakeholders, with the plethora of expectations - these are really big areas. Because a lot of times in professional services, if you're selling into medium-sized businesses or larger, not small businesses - you're going to have the original people you sold into. Who cut the checks, leadership, other people. And then you're going to be handed off to implementation teams or the next teams down. And so how do you keep that group of stakeholders aware as to what is going on exactly? 

There are lots of solutions to this. Obviously, centralized environment mutual plans. I'm going to pound you with mutual plans because they work. It's not because it's just an idea. They literally work, and it's mutual. It also helps with your team committing, and of course, the client teams. But really creating that unwavering amount of transparency about where you're at and how things are progressing - good or bad - is key to that. All right?

“Develop a Standardized HO and Onboarding Process”

Second one is, if you haven't actually mapped out your handoff process. If you're a little bit of a larger organization, meaning you have silos of sales off to implementation teams, or if you're larger and you have blended stuff you might have onboarding teams. You might have CS teams. We don't really care what titles are, but you just have to think about what is the flow of professional services or project that you are generating. Who touches that from the minute it's been sold, or almost sold, all the way through to the post 120 days after launch. And literally mapping that out. What is the handoff process? What needs to be shared? How do we handle all this? And then, obviously your onboarding process. 

And I alluded to this earlier. I'm letting you guys read all the bullet points. But a lot of the things around this are mutual plans, creating clear flows, and having people own certain things and holding them accountable to those dates. And different ways of doing that, of course, are possible. You might be saying again, well, Joe, every project we do is so different. No, the details of what you do might be different, but executing a process - management of expectation, management recaps, keeping stakeholders in alignment on a weekly, bi-weekly basis. Whatever the agreed structure is it is repeatable, it is measurable, and you can do that, no matter what you're doing.

And that's real important, because something that is not measured or repeatable is hard to improve. And we have come into many groups that are just straight up, regular, like coaching or consulting companies. Engineering, you name it. And they're like, well, Joe, every project is literally different. Well, obviously. But not the customer experience and your expectations as a VP, or as a manager, or as the customer. Those expectations are high.

And you want to have visibility on where things are at, and are they progressing well? And if they are - what we call Smokey the Bear moments where you see smoke - you want to know about that as soon as possible. Because if you address that at the smoke level, you can prevent forest fires. Forest fires, in this metaphor, is revenue. 

“Establish Clear Success Metrics”

Clear metrics of success. Again. This is sometimes more prevalent in our software clients. Because they are like, “Oh, people are hiring a software to be X or Y to do this.” But whatever you're doing, what was the original true goals and expectations of those clear metrics? Because these are critical pieces of communication and collaboration, back to the leadership during the project. Because your project might take three months, it might take two years – depends on what it is, right? 

A conversion might be a custom project. You know, these types of things can be very, very long. So again, making sure that you're creating – because this is what is justifying your expense, your services, and outcomes right? Okay, so the first three, right there. 

[18:14] Screen showing slide: 5+ Strategies to Simplify Client Implementation

18:15 – 24:10

Joseph Knecht: 5+ Strategies to Simplify Client Implementation 

Second one, second set. I alluded to this. 

“Streamline Data Sharing and Updates”

Make sure you have an environment for this data sharing and collaboration. We've done tons of meetings about this. There are some great articles on the side about garbage in, garbage out. Because this is a huge problem in professional services and just project-based stuff - communication and collaboration. And then, what you're collaborating on and the data right?
And so that's a very big piece.  think about how you're managing that, reviewing the data, making sure everything is going well. Because that's where timelines and poor deliveries live – is in bad data. Or the classic example is you receive the data, and no one looks at it for two weeks, and then you finally look at it and its garbage or the wrong data. And now everything's delayed even longer. It's the classic use case of that.

Make sure you have data processes in place and review elements built into that. We do that via mutual plans or checklists, to help clean the data first.  the data you get has already been validated and elements like that. But then there are workflows to clean it. Make sure it's correct, so that these things don't pop up at the end. That really can tick you off - implementation. You know, basically strategy.

“Leverage Technology for Automation”

Technology for automation. These sounds like it's a little bit seated. But it's true. So obviously, we have a purpose-built solution for implementation and onboarding. And it really, really helps with the consistency of engagement. Whether you're a small team - so that you can do more projects - or you're a big team and you're growing fast, when you're hiring new talent, getting them ramped up. But then, ultimately, there's a massive number of efficiencies on your side. But it's also the expectations of the clients and really meeting them where they want to be met. I would challenge many of you, if any of you watch the football game on Sunday, many of you might have ordered pizza. And for a $10 expense, you expect to see that thing going in the oven, coming out of the oven, knowing what the temperature of the oven was. You want to see that. Get into a car - you want to see that. It's two miles from your house, right? Your expectation of a $10 transaction is pretty high. Let's just be honest with ourselves. It's the same thing with the $12 Netflix on demand account. Your expectations are pretty high. 

Now flip that to B2B and somebody doing a contract of professional services or a project with you for $50,000, $100,000, or $2.5 million. Their expectations are pretty high. If you think of what their average daily life of feedback, updates, where are things at? How are things going? Are things good? You have to rethink your expectations there.  technology is a big piece of that.

“Foster a Culture of Continuous Improvement”

And then the last one, which is probably one of the harder things to do for clients. There’re two distinct concepts here, because you have to be more and more candid with yourself. One, after every project or contract, literally meeting with the client and understanding what went well and what didn't go. Well, some of you, maybe your services are a little bit more transactional. Still, you should be doing this. But to really improve the onboarding and the whole client experience, it's really about going to them and asking them what they liked, what they didn't like.

Whether it's through customer advisory boards you might have or just directly calling them. Now, the antithesis of that – which we also have modules in our tool to help with – is what we call pre-mortems. And in the pre-mortem culture – and if you like this concept, we're doing an actual separate webinar about pre-mortems sometime coming up here. I believe it's up for registration and we're going to really heavily unpack it in that one. But pre-mortems are when you're kicking off a project or a professional services contract, deploying a software – we use this for all different delivery types - is actually asking the client, and there's a process around this to mitigate risk, is if in six months we have another meeting and we're talking about why this didn't work or why this failed. What do you think the causes of that could be? 

And it's amazing. And you're doing this with the client. It's amazing what people will say. And you'll hear a lot of things that you probably were not considering. And these things could greatly affect the timelines. It could greatly affect the success of the project. You'll find out that Bobby in accounting is going to be out for three weeks in Cancun because it's his 50th anniversary. And nobody knew that, right? And you need Bobby, a lot, right? Things of that nature.  this is a real big piece. And then those are used for the mutual plans and all the other elements. The tools that you're using to drive and communicate about the project.  it's a very, very important piece from that aspect.  it's facilitating the conversations and then leveraging that information to drive your mutual plans. You know everything around the execution there, right? And so, your chances of success and holding people accountable are much, much higher. Okay? So those are six. I know, we talked about five.  I'm going to jump. (Changes slide)

[24:10] Screen showing slide: Equipping Projects for Success 

24:11 – 29:49

Joseph Knecht: Equipping Projects for Success

And some of you are looking more for like, what does that mean, Joey, in the real world? And how would that play out?’ So let me share. And again, most of these, all of these concepts have resources on our website (changes slide to Proteus Engage Falcon site) and I'll share some of those in my follow up with you for cheat sheets.  Literally, the metrics. How to do a pre-mortem, like all sorts of stuff here. But ultimately, let me show you how we help clients solve this problem again – rip off and duplicate – would encourage conversations with us. But ultimately this is an environment that our product creates.  this is what we call an Engage workspace.

This is client-facing. There's a ton of back-end. I'm not doing a demo today. What I'm providing you with is just an optimized, shared environment between you and your team and the client’s team.  there's all the people here on the left-hand side (using pointer on left side of screen). And then for many of our professional services clients and project-based organizations or consulting groups, etc., they have something like this where they have discovery (hovers pointer over Discovery). Which is in that sales process, aligning the project and checklist for data collection, quoting – doing all that here. You don't have to do that, obviously. But a lot of our clients recognize that poor success during the onboarding and project results is because it was misquoted or misaligned at the beginning.

You might want to share resources about your team and your consultants (selects Our Team from menu). A lot of times in professional services, you're trying to showcase people. Experts, SMEs, all sorts of things. A lot of our clients like to do recaps (selects Recaps and Updates from menu). You can do text recap, of course, document recaps. Video recaps are extremely popular in this, because people consume information on demand. A lot of times leadership, off hours. So that's really, really popular. And again, this is all centralized.

Many of our partners want to do resource libraries (select Resources from menu). All sorts of things can happen inside the tool set. But these are common structures. And then, when you get into your onboarding and delivery of said project, this is also a common structure that we see. 

Again, all of this is customizable. But for rip off and duplicate, if you have your handoff (selects HO - Kickoff from Menu) - HO Is handoffs – and obviously the kickoff process and all sorts of mutual plans. And all of these have data collection, files, forms, video delivery - anything. There's full automation and follow-ups. We do a lot of automations to help drive and predict risk, also reminding and trying to hold people more accountable on that side.  this is an entire tool set here. I'm not going to go into it, but many times our clients have some sort of handoff/kickoff.

They also have some sort of implementation process (selects Implementation from menu) that they want to run through. Al a lot of our clients have to do installs like, go on Prem [Premise Setup] and do that.  we track everything on Prem also.  there's lots of different pieces to this. Al if you have 3rd-party people helping, they can also be in here.  it's all centralized.

A lot of our clients do training and that last minute getting the client (selects Training and Go Live from menu) – if you're delivering something to them or delivery. Again, these are just high-level for you to steal. And then, very important, (selecting Post Launch from the menu) for a lot of our clients is post launch - which is satisfaction surveys - but then also the first 120 days of adoption.  depending on what you're doing, it is highly recommended that you're watching the clients’ utilization or results from what you deployed with them.

This is just right away. We also h.  a complete QBR process - quarterly business reviews – and other kind of processes that we deliver through the platform. But for today's purposes, for project delivery, professional services, coaching engineering services, whatever it might be, this is a very, very common structure. What is here can be limited by who, what, whatever. But this is a very robust environment. And again, everything is being tracked here - communication, collaboration, all the documentation, and all of the processes.

There are templates behind everything here, making this very fast and simple to deploy.  And it really, really helps with that consistency of engagement clients. And this is two-way, (selects Discovery from menu) tons with your team. And then, of course, on the client you're onboarding there.  just wanted to bring to life 30,000 foot. Again – wet the beak.

We do have pilots with professional services clients where you can use the tool for ten deployments. I'll include that in our thing. We have a PS pilot, which allows you to utilize our platform for up to ten deployments. And at that time, we obviously expect you're going to be seeing quite a high return. But the solution itself is not very expensive at all. Right? Around $50 a seat - and that's only on your team. Nothing to do with your clients.  we have a lot of small business clients, and we have a tremendous number of enterprise clients. Really the full gamut there.  this is how you can see a lot of the bleeding points and the pitfalls we talked about counts. It really remediates with infrastructure like this. And hopefully (changes slide back to Equipping Projects for Success) you got some ideas of maybe, some of those bleeding points and those pitfalls and then how that might help. With that said (showing slide Deal Alignment – Seamless Information) – 

[29:59] Screen showing slide: Resources to Help

30:00 – 31:15Joseph Knecht: Resources to Help

I offer this up and it's been taken advantage of quite a bit. A lot of our webinar attendees again are at different phases of their journey. And I do offer up just a one-to-one session with me. And that allows me to hear where your challenges are and what your ideas are. 

I know our tool set can help, but everybody's at different phases or different processes within their business growth or needs.  that's my email there. I will be following up with everybody and offering our PS trial. And so please take advantage of that. For some of you who might only do five projects a year, the tool is free.  lots of good things. I'll be following up with everybody here. Hopefully, you got some good nuggets of knowledge out of this conversation. I do encourage that pre-mortem webinar; I know we have a webinar coming up. But our posts, our previous webinars, and also some of our resources – I will share with you in my follow-up so that you can take direct action and do that. I appreciate everybody's time today and we'll see you at the next webinar. Thanks, everybody.

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