Professional Services Principles - Prescribing Success

According to Project Sherpa’s Professional Services Principles, one of the keys to delivering successful Professional Services is “Prescribing Success” and leaning into your ability as an expert to influence outcomes for your customer.?There are four techniques when it comes to “Prescribing Success”.

• Prescribe:?Be clear that your recommendation is that of an expert; hired for your expertise and skill. ?Use historical success and long-term safety as your reasoning.
• Quantify:?There is always a potential cost and consequence of not following your recommendation. ?What are those costs and consequences and how are they relevant to the customer?
• Transfer the Risk Acceptance:?Is the customer willing to be responsible for what happens if they do not follow your prescription? ??Get this acknowledgement in writing.?
• Escalate: ?Some prescriptions for success are so important that they must be escalated.

These four techniques can be used by themselves but are often more effective when combined together.??Don’t forget, these crucial conversations can be a delicate situation where it is best to lead with heart and empathy.??

“Our team is highly skilled at doing this work, has done it hundreds of times, and learned a lot of hard lessons, with the scar tissue to prove it.?Let’s collaborate, review your designs, implementation plans and process steps so we can share that collective knowledge and avoid the same pitfalls.?We can set the conditions for your success and minimize business impacts.” ?

“You are not alone in this.?We’ve a team of highly qualified experts in this technology.?They’ve seen this particular approach take down an entire network and cause significant outage time because of a missed step.?Let us help, we are here to make you successful.”

“We’d like to recommend a tactical pause in these situations.?There are significant negative consequences and risks involved with continuing as is.?Let’s pull the team together, review issues, determine the root cause and recommend a way forward.?If you’d prefer to proceed without a pause, we’ll need your acknowledgement of the risks involved and direction to proceed in writing.”

Often, just raising the concern and prescribing a way forward is enough to get a conversation going around the issue and working toward a resolution.