Benchmarking as a Way of Life: Measuring Services Like It’s 2030

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from nearly three decades in professional services, it’s that our industry has a fascinating relationship with measurement. We love metrics. We live by them. But sometimes, we forget to ask if they’re still measuring what actually matters.

That’s the conversation I’ll be diving into at the Leaders in Consulting Summit 2025, alongside Connor Budden from Service Performance Insight (SPI) and Stephen Edward from PTS Global, in our mainstage session, “Measuring Services Like It’s 2030: Rethinking KPIs, Benchmarks & What Really Matters.”

Because the truth is many of the KPIs professional services firms still rely on were designed for a world that no longer exists.

Yesterday’s KPIs Can’t Power Tomorrow’s Business

Let’s be honest: the metrics that defined the professional services industry for the last twenty years — utilization, billable hours — were born in an era where work was linear, predictable, and almost entirely human.

But 2025 has made one thing painfully clear: that world is gone. Today, delivery is dynamic. Teams are fluid. Projects evolve mid-flight. AI agents are quietly doing their share of the work. And the best consultants aren’t just billing time — they’re building IP.

So when firms tell me they’re still defining success by how many hours their people work, I feel a pang of worry. It’s a little like measuring a Formula One car by how much fuel it burns. It tells you something, sure — but it’s not the thing that wins races.

The KPI Crossroads: From Counting Inputs to Understanding Outputs

Our new reality demands a new measurement mindset that reflects how professional services businesses actually create value.

That means moving from counting inputs to understanding outcomes, and from lagging indicators (“what happened?”) to living systems (“what’s emerging, and what should we do about it?”).

The smartest firms I talk to aren’t chasing more dashboards — they’re rethinking the DNA of performance measurement itself. They’re asking bigger questions:

• How fast does our organization learn?
• How consistently do we reuse what we know?
• How quickly can we redeploy capability when demand shifts?
• How effectively are humans and AI combining to deliver results?
• And increasingly: How balanced is our portfolio of services? What’s repeatable and low-margin, what’s high-value and differentiated, and are we evolving that mix fast enough?

These go beyond operational questions to existential ones. They tell you how adaptable your business is — and adaptability will be the currency of the leading professional services firm of 2030.

Evolving KPIs for the Expertise Era

What matters to services leaders is clearly changing — and if we believe the old credo “you measure what matters,” then what we measure has to change too.

When we talk to firms, the themes are remarkably consistent:

If these are the problems that matter, the next generation of KPIs won’t just be prettier charts of the same old numbers. They’ll look different — and they’ll behave differently. Here’s how I think the scorecard starts to evolve.

1. Outcomes vs. Hours → Proving Impact, Not Just Effort

We’ll still care about utilization and revenue per head, but they’ll be joined by metrics that explicitly link work to value, for example:

• Outcome Reliability: % of engagements where the promised business outcome is achieved on time and on budget.
• Time to First Value: how long it takes from kickoff to the first measurable client benefit, not just “go-live.”
• Outcome Uplift per Client: improvement in key client KPIs (conversion, cycle time, cost-to-serve) across the relationship, not just per project.

These answer the question our existing KPIs dodge: “Did it actually work?”

2. Tribal Knowledge → Expertise that Survives Turnover

If losing one person means losing the playbook, you don’t have a sustainable business. Future KPIs will track how well expertise is captured, reused, and adapted in order to support the ongoing evolution of the business:

• Expertise Retention Index: the proportion of a departing expert’s methods, templates, and patterns that are captured and remain in active use.
• Knowledge Activation Ratio: % of live delivery that uses approved playbooks, assets, or frameworks rather than one-off inventions.
• Scope-from-Reality Rate: % of new proposals that are based on data from past deliveries (actual effort, risks, and outcomes) instead of guesswork.

These tell you whether your organization gets smarter with each engagement, or simply older.

3. Deliver More, Better → Designing the Right Mix of People and Agents

As AI agents take on real work, “more” and “better” stop being synonyms. We’ll need KPIs that describe the shape of delivery, not just its volume:

• Delivery Readiness Index: a pre-kickoff score that looks at whether the right skills, assets, and agents are in place before you start.
• People–to–Agent Mix Ratio: how much of delivery work is human vs. AI-assisted, and how that mix correlates with margin and client satisfaction.
• Revenue Quality: the share of revenue that is recurring, expansion-friendly, or tied to long-term value vs. one-off project bursts.

Taken together, these metrics move us past “Did we staff it?” toward “Did we staff it intelligently — and did that design actually pay off?”

4. Portfolio Balance → Evolving the Services Mix

Underneath all of this sits the portfolio view. In an AI-driven, fast-changing market, it’s no longer enough to have a long list of services; you need a balanced and evolving portfolio:

• Portfolio Mix Index: the split between low-margin, repeatable services and high-value, differentiated services.
• Differentiated Win Rate: win rate on offerings where you truly stand apart vs. commoditized work.
• Portfolio Evolution Rate: how quickly revenue shifts toward newer, higher-value offerings over time.

These measures force a different conversation: not “Can we chase this bespoke opportunity?” but “Does this opportunity fit the portfolio we’re trying to build?”

From Lagging to Leading: Where Benchmarking Fits

Once you start thinking this way, another realization hits:

It’s not just the KPIs that are evolving — it’s your entire relationship with benchmarking.

Historically, benchmarking has been a periodic sense-check. Once a year (if that), you’d look at a report and ask: “How do we stack up on utilization, margin, win rate?” Helpful, yes — but by the time you get the answer, this year’s problems have already rolled into next year.

In the future, the most valuable benchmarks will be:

• More leading than lagging.
  
  Are our skills keeping pace with demand? Is our client health trending up or down before renewal? Are our people-to-agent ratios creating the margins we expected?
• More contextual.
  
  How do firms like us perform — in our industry, size band, business model — not just “the average PS organization”?
• More continuous.
  
  Not a snapshot, but a feed. Not “last year’s ranking,” but “where we sit this quarter and whether we’re getting better.”

This is exactly why we’re so excited that Kantata is the first vendor with access to SPI Inside.

SPI has spent almost two decades building the richest benchmarking dataset in our industry. Until now, it’s largely been something you looked at outside your operational systems — a powerful mirror, but still separate.

With SPI Inside, we’re turning that mirror into a live reference point inside the system professional services leaders use daily to drive impactful decisions:

• You’ll be able to see how your utilization, margins, time-to-value, or revenue mix compare to peers as you operate.
• As you experiment with new KPIs — outcome reliability, expertise reuse, people vs. agent mix — you’ll be able to understand where you’re out in front and where you’re drifting behind.
• Benchmarking stops being an annual event and becomes a way of life: an always-on conversation between how you’re performing and what great looks like.

In other words, continuous benchmarking is what turns an evolved scorecard into a self-correcting system.

Why This Matters Now

We’re heading into a decade where the firms that win in professional services will:

• Treat expertise as infrastructure — captured, reused, and continuously evolved, not just something that lives in people’s heads.
• Measure client health and outcome reliability as rigorously as utilization.
• Understand how humans and AI combine to create value — and design for that.
• Continuously evolve and rebalance their portfolio of services — knowing when to lean into repeatable offerings and when to double down on the differentiated work where they truly win.
• Use continuous benchmarking to stay a few steps ahead of both the market and their own bad habits.

That’s the world we’ll be exploring at Leaders in Consulting 2025: not just new KPIs, but a new relationship with measurement itself.

Because if we’re serious about thriving in the AI-powered services era, it’s time to stop measuring like it’s 2015 — and start measuring services like it’s 2030.