Working with Managed Services: Lessons learned from Professional Services perspective

Back in 2018 I was given an 8-month assignment different from the usual Project delivery routine, work with a newly formed Managed Services (MS) team comprising a balanced mix of experienced people and newcomers, the objective was to contribute with my knowledge of a particular solution and a few others, take part in operations and customer interaction. While it is true that I have been supporting MS colleagues from other teams every now and then, this time I would have the chance to leave Professional Services (PS) for a while and fully embrace this new experience.

Professional Services, a busy occupation

In a high-level view, typical PS duties involve:

  • Understand the customer demands according to an agreed scope.
  • Be onsite (not in pandemic days) to conduct a workshop which will guide the creation of a functional specification to be reviewed and approved.
  • Implement and test the solution.
  • onsite to support User Acceptance tests and Go-live phase.
  • Handover activities to MS (when applicable) and Support team.
  • Warranty period

The cycle above repeats itself in almost every project, sometimes I would not even be able to complete all activities due to a different assignment request with higher priority showing up so another consultant would take charge after a handover.

I always had questions like these after a few months of delivery:

  • What are the users doing with the solutions now?
  • What are their challenges once they are on their own?
  • Is my delivery still valuable to them?
  • Who or what is filling a possible gap I did not know before?

I got most of the answers I wanted to find out through Managed services.

Getting to know customer challenges via hands-on experience

I mentioned earlier that every now and then I would get in touch with MS colleagues to collaborate with answers to doubts and solve level 3 incidents which allowed me to have a superficial view of their workdays and imagine what a customer with no MS contract would have to deal with in operations. After being assigned to co-work with MS I switched my mindset to take ownership of the operation, be a member of the customer staff, be responsible for results tracked every day and put myself into the user shoes.

Customer obsession has been quite the buzzword these days, but it is challenging to have the ultimate degree of empathy without the notion of how one feels or experiences a situation, it is the “I know exactly how that feels like” sensation. Key takeaways:

  • PS and Developers, solutions may not be as straight forward as you may think, remember, you are used to it since you created it, you have likely overlooked details others can see in a day-to-day basis. Engage the customer to extract this feedback from him or if you have the chance to operate it in a real-world scenario then do it to rethink your biases concerning deliverables.
  • Customers operating solutions on their own might not be exploring them to their full potential regardless of prior training sessions, this is especially true in upgrade scenarios where new helpful features are added and can go unnoticed. This is a risk since one may completely resort to Excel spreadsheets again and start losing the perception of value.
  • The customer/user should be questioned regularly how and where he perceives value on the service provided and areas that are lacking behind, it will permit means to improve our services/products in small continuous steps. Do not fall into the trap of letting him get upset and later find out he chose other providers either because of costs or a service not fully meeting expectations. Higher costs can be justified if value (perceived benefits) is achieved and maintained.
  • Being a trusted advisor is a must to co-create value with your customer, he is eager to hear from you new findings about the business and areas of attention. After all, you are in one of the battlefield fronts so you should have key pieces of information to communicate.
  • Managers, there is a need to free up some of the strategic resources from operation for a period so that they can either focus on implementing improvements or guide those who will, otherwise, efficiency will be compromised in the long run.

Problem solving and growing with your team

Go-lives are tough and highly demanding, it takes a few months to stabilize the operation with diligent assessments and fine-tuning, a major factor is that no matter how senior or junior you are, each member has a unique set of skills where this combination strengthens the team to achieve results. With this setup, we were able to share experiences and different perspectives that perhaps only staying in PS I would not be exposed to because naturally each job has delimited scopes, I believe that this perception was also reciprocal since my intent was to pass on knowledge from a PS perspective, in the end, I acquired new skills to shape and criticize my own way of working.

A wealth of knowledge is that of which can be multiplied

I have come from a background of supportive colleagues who contributed for my professional growth from day one until today, this mindset begets a chain of outcomes like compound interest rates, the more you invest in it the more you get the next day. When consulted for guidance I could perform an informal mentorship, we all have that moment of “I wish someone would have told me that before”, a colleague may benefit from offered directions so that his accomplishments can come faster. If someone is willing to listen and extract lessons from what you want to share, do not hesitate to spend some of your time with this person as someone else hopefully did to you.

Final words

I could elaborate more on each subject of this article, however, its objective is to be as short as possible to express that if you have a remote opportunity of interacting with other areas out of your reach, do so! First, it will get you out of your comfort zone. Second, it may allow you to reposition your thoughts and judgements. Lastly, it will enlarge your arsenal of tools to better deal with different situations in your professional life.