Member Article

The characteristics of continually improving businesses

Professional service organisations are continually growing. In order to ensure that you’re maintaining efficiency whilst growing your business, you should ensure you’re displaying the same definitive characteristics as other fast-growing organisations. It’s important to look at some of the key characteristics, such as happy staff who have clear objectives and meet goals regularly, as well as maintaining data that is represented accurately and consistently across all business systems.

There’s also ways to continually improve your organisation. Investing in a project-based systems can improve aspects of your business such as internal communications and can lead to smoother business management. Use of the right technology is a key characteristic of continually improving professional services organisations and one you ought to adopt if you want to improve too. In order to maintain efficiency as your organisation grows you first need to ensure you are displaying the core characteristics of a fast-growing Professional Services business.

Your people

• Are happy staff
• With clear objectives
• Who achieve regular goals
• And communicate well with each other

Your systems

• Are clearly defined and explained
• Making them easy to use
• Aligned to your business plan
• And regularly monitored for effectiveness and efficiency
• Support your employees
• Provide greater visibility and control

Your data

• Is represented accurately and consistently across all business systems
• Can be collected and reported in a real-time way
• And is fully transparent – from meaning to use

Your projects

• Are structured according to time and budget
• With all progress recorded
• Making everyone aware of project status at any time

Three tips for growing your business:

1. Consider investing in an ERP system to align and support all of your business processes. A project-based ERP which is specifically tailored for Professional Services will give you the transparency you need to improve internal communication and meet business goals by recording each project that your business undertakes.
2. Focus on what you do best and outsource the rest: its sounds simple, but makes perfect sense. Working this way means your business will remain more efficient, nimble and progress at a faster pace than it would if you had to do everything yourself – it’s important to make the most of the support around you.
3. Ensure your business culture is collaborative, supportive and communicative. Happy, well-informed staff are the key to keeping your business growing in an efficient way.

How an ERP system helps.

• It smooths the path of day-to-day business management
• Integrates with existing business systems
• And is not about starting again, but simply improving on what you have

Like the earth, the picture of your business should be three dimensional and not flat. A large sphere showing you:

• The resource performing the work
• The project for which the work was accomplished
• The costs and profits associated with the project

Does the system you use in your Professional Services business accomplish all of this? If it doesn’t, an ERP system is one of the things to consider.

Remember:

The core characteristics of a continually improving Professional Services organisation are:

• Aware of its staff and people-focused
• Concise and data savvy
• Diligent and project-led

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Fergus Gilmore .