The need for businesses to operate more quickly is not a novel concept. A wealth of research before the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of speed-to-market enabled by modern technology. For instance, in his world-renowned book The Lean Startup, Eric Ries introduced the Build-Measure-Learn loop that emphasizes speed as a key ingredient to customer development. Before the pandemic, these speed-to-market principles were mostly adopted in a product environment. But in the new normal, all will be different in professional services as well. To succeed in this new normal, professional services companies will need a more responsive organizational model.
As firms struggle to stay relevant and at the forefront of new and emerging issues such as right-shoring, artificial intelligence adoption and new product development under a cost-constraint landscape, we suspect that centralized programs of knowledge management, research, marketing, client relationship management and innovation will be mostly reactive and too slow to keep up with the speed of changes.
The pandemic is forcing professional services organizations to evaluate and rebuild work processes from the ground up, eliminating inefficiencies and emphasizing speed to market. This will be especially true at the beginning of the recovery as new consumer and business habits take shape.
Companies will need timely information to make good investment decisions about client direction and their response to clients’ strategic shifts and new products and services. The traditional feedback loop from the field to senior decision makers and back to the field on product and service development is simply too slow.
This may call for a new wave of “delayering,” where decision makers set out criteria up front and make intelligent investment, operational and strategic decisions through processing unfiltered information directly from clients. For example, what we are currently seeing in vaccine development, where cycles have been compressed, regulations streamlined and risks associated with moving to human trials mitigated quickly is a good example of the new environment.
To effectively develop an efficient business model, companies should consider the following:
Additionally, this risk taking may involve making uncertain talent decisions as the profile for the successful client manager and consultant in the new world may be very different from what we are used to.
A well-choreographed team process, working in sync remotely and with technology, will help bring a professional and polished look to the firm, as well as improve profitability through reduced missteps and rework. These concepts have been referred to in the management literature for decades as socio-technical systems. In fact, this is a prime example of how professional services companies could adopt a Build-Measure-Learn loop as they explore the path toward perfection.
Different talent with an ability to understand new technology, thrive in virtual work, manage remote teams, make real-time decisions and pivot quickly to identify and solve client needs will be required to thrive and succeed in this new organizational model. Being effective in a more fluid, flatter, risk-tolerant organization will be key to gathering timely information and translating it into client needs.
Temporary assignments and rotating leadership positions may be the order of the day, with reward systems designed to allow for fluidity among roles and talent movement to best take advantage of an organization’s human capital. We believe that professional firms with the following attributes are best positioned to thrive:
Change is always exciting for the professional services industry, and to say that our world is changing rapidly would be an understatement. Over the past few months, we have published a few articles on how professional services firms should think about talent (“Professional services: Talent in the age of COVID-19,” Executive Pay Memo, April 21, 2020) and creating a vision for the future ("Professional services: Prospering in the new normal," Executive Pay Memo, May 14, 2020). In this follow-up and final piece of the series, we hope that our imagination of the future will inspire new thinking in the organization and management of professional services firms.
