SPI Research | Accelerate Service Productivity & Profit

"We look forward to the new SPI benchmark report every year. SPI continues to produce the only report with as much detail on a massive variety of variables and KPI’s that PS organizations have to look at to hone their businesses. There is no more efficient way to evaluate our progress and compare strategy and tactical options as we continue to build out our organization through fast growth."
Steven Laine
President
Future State

"I look forward to participating and receiving this report every year. SPI Research seems remarkable in their ability to stay ahead of the trends that affect PS with insights that are specific to the path we are on. Their analysis is chock full of relevant detail that is actionable in our business. I recommend this to anyone in the professional services or enterprise software markets."
Mike Alsup
SVP
Gimmal

"Every year I am waiting for the results of the PS Maturity benchmark. This year again I was not disappointed, I am impressed with the accessibility of the data and how dead-on your conclusions were with regards to movements in the market. They align with our experience and allow us to make well documented and supported decisions about the ongoing future of our team and our products."
Tirza Lowenstyn
VP, Professional Services
Unit 4 North America

"I just described SPI to someone as my favorite think tank. Seriously. Maybe I’m weird, but I look forward to the annual PS Maturity Benchmark more than any film, album or J.K. Rowling novel. As far as business impact, in terms of raw financials, I used last year’s results (2012’s survey) to frame our revenue and EBITDA expectations for 2014. From where I’m sitting, it looks like we’ll move up the maturity model as it relates to $/hr and utilization. The cautiously optimistic view also sees us hitting an EBITDA goal that will trigger material profit sharing payouts for even entry level employees. We’re on our way.
As far as the “fuzzier” impacts, the PS Maturity Model has taught our org to “act its age.” That is, we collectively see the value in greater maturity and have agreed to routinely assess ourselves and put together the necessary planning for continued evolution. However, we also recognize the level we’ve achieved and are careful to stretch our operations further than the next immediate level. For example, in some areas of our business we still rely on heroics; however, we’ve identified this and devote time to extracting from our heroes what makes them great and then wrapping training programs around it so all may be lifted up around them. We’ve noticed that when you scale your heroes such that their way of operating becomes the standard, you can create premium services that differentiate your business from competitors. This has allowed us to close much larger deals with solid profit margins.
Further, the concept of “productization,” that is, a repeatable process that yields the same expected results every time has been super huge for us. When we sell campaigns, they all begin as uniform offerings with pricing tiers for different expectations (this is obvious but difficult to implement at low maturity levels). Clients looking for services in our marketing communication vertical strongly desire the same experience of buying an iPhone from an Apple store as they do from their services vendors. They want to know that there’s always going to be a beautiful, defect free LCD screen on every campaign so to speak. Relatedly, we’ve taken an iterative approach to service development that we stole from the Agile software development paradigm. It’s working wonderfully and a credit to SPI circa 2012.
Anyway, I love your report and the work you do. It’s incredibly validating to know there are others thinking this way. I recommend it to all my services peers."
Phil Golobish
VP, Services
DigitalRelevance

"Excellent as usual – thanks for sending this through. Must work harder and smarter to get to the B of the B!"
Alan Waitt
Global Director
ASI Consulting

"Congratulations on getting out another great report. I’ve only been through the first 50 pages and have already found many bits of insightful information that I want to share with our management team. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that the “best-of-the-Best” are always looking for ways to improve. As a five time winner you would think that we have it all under control. I can assure you that we are always looking for more improvement, greater efficiencies, happier clients and of course better financials. Your report gives us a great place to stop and reflect on how we are doing and what we can do to improve."
Bruce Lovenberg
CFO
Logical Design Solutions

"I look forward to the SPI Maturity Benchmark report every year. We use the report in our annual strategic planning exercise and as an input to many of our operational targets for items like attrition rate, billable utilization and realized rates. Being an analytics driven company, we are especially interested in trends. The study’s multi-year view on many of the metrics is one of the things that really separates this report from much of the other research in this space."
Bob Westerkamp
Dir. PS Strategic Planning and Delivery Alliances
Teradata Corp

"I have participated in the research and have viewed this report each of the last three years. The report consistently provides a representative view of the industry by company type and informs our technology and process decisions."
David Haffty
Stage 7 Consulting

"Once again, you’ve provided a great resource to the industry. The maturity model and benchmark report have provided us a roadmap of improvements to influence many KPIs we now measure, and it’s also been instrumental to internally communicating our performance relative to the industry. Since we began benchmarking ourselves in 2010, we’ve averaged over 22% annual revenue growth and an amazing 92% annual growth in margin. You are heroes for making us heroes!"
Darin Byrne
Sr. Director, Professional Services
Wolters Kluwer Financial Services

"The PS Maturity Benchmark is a core input to our business planning process. It allows us to understand and explain the trends within our industry and provides us with the credibility to set the right KPIs and annual targets. Most benchmark reports only scratch the surface - the SPI report drills down and slices the data to allow a deep understanding of the most important levers in our PS business."
Michael Stamler
Vice President, Global Customer Services
North Plains

"As a growing professional services firm, the very detailed information found within the survey have been extremely valuable for benchmarking ourselves and guiding us on what areas of our business require investment for improvement. Thank-you for this high quality resource!"
Marco Formaggio
Managing Director
BluLeader Pty Ltd

"As a small company, we were not sure if we could extract value from the SPI Professional Services Benchmark. However, we found valuable insights on the consulting market, an understanding for how we fit, and hard-facts that will help us with decision-making, i.e., information that we can use in the near- and long-term. For example, we were able to gain insights that will help to customize, position, and market our services. I am pleasantly surprised by the depth, breadth, and value of the information in the SPI Professional Services Benchmark."
Gloria J. Miller
Principal & Managing Consultant,
Maxmetrics

"I have found the type of information in the 2013 PS Maturity™ Benchmark report to be invaluable for helping to continue building out a top-caliber professional services team, especially given all the changes that we continue to see in the PS marketplace. It has helped us to identify gaps in our services organization and has presented us with the hard data needed to support opportunities for continuing improvements & growth in our service delivery, especially in areas that are evolving rapidly."
Tony Gray
Director, North American Consulting Services
Webtrends

"I have reviewed this year’s PS Maturity Benchmark. Again, you have raised the bar. This year’s report is an encyclopedia of the state of the PS industry, what differentiates the leaders from the middle of the pack, and methods and investments that can be undertaken to achieve best of breed PS status. There are a variety of paths to PS success, and you provide a roadmap that delineates alternative paths. Congratulations."
Mike Alsup
Sr. Vice President
Gimmal

"Every year we look forward to the PS Maturity Benchmark report. We have a strong internal focus on continuous process improvement, and the report provides valuable insight and analysis that we leverage to improve our professional services delivery."
Steve Canfield
VP of Professional Services
BlueCielo ECM Solutions

"We really have learned to count on the annual benchmark report to measure our progress and prioritize our investments. The information is directly useful to me in running the company today, and also as we have evolved the business from a pure staffing to a primarily professional services organization. The breadth of information and the unmatched quality has been critical in making good decisions, faster. It also offers peace of mind to have data backing up options and decisions. There is no better place to get such a comprehensive overview for the professional services industry. Thank you!"
Steven Laine
President
Futurestate

"Over the years the PS Benchmark has taken the role within Griffiths Waite of a Non Exec Board Member with advice being sought as to trends, comparisons and gaps within our planning. Each year another nugget of innovation or best business practice is uncovered and presented in a very useable format."
Ian Heathcock
Business Development Director
Griffiths Waite

"SPI’s PS Maturity Benchmark provides core inputs that as an embedded PSO we are challenged to uncover elsewhere."
David Shimberg
Director, Global Services Marketing
BMC Software

"The PS Benchmark’s quantity and quality of data is unparalleled in the industry. I have found it to be an invaluable resource for all aspects of strategic planning, and am constantly using it as a best-practices / benchmark reference tool as we take our organization from good to great in terms of processes, systems and human capital."
Andrew Fletcher
Vice President
Business & Decision North America

About SPI Research

Service Performance Insight (SPI) is a global research, consulting and training organization dedicated to helping professional service organizations (PSOs) make quantum improvements in productivity and profit. In 2007, SPI developed the PS Maturity Model™ as a strategic planning and management framework. It is now the industry-leading performance improvement tool used by over 20,000 project- and services-driven organizations to chart their course to service excellence.

The core tenet of the PS Maturity Model™ is PSOs achieve success through the optimization of five Service Performance Pillars™:
- Leadership – Vision, Strategy and Culture
- Client Relationships
- Human Capital Alignment
- Service Execution
- Finance and Operations
SPI provides a unique depth of operating experience combined with unsurpassed analytic capability. We not only diagnose areas for improvement but also provide the business value of change. We then work collaboratively with our clients to create new management processes to transform and ignite performance.
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