What is Operations Management and Why Do You Need It?
Running any professional services business is complicated, even for experienced managers and C-level executives. But when an organization grows – and the range of responsibilities and team members in the workforce grows along with it – it can be overwhelming.
While detailed resource management and project management is crucial to taking control of the day-to-day needs that keep your business running, what professional services organizations truly need is to embrace operations management.
As defined by Investopedia, “Operations management is the administration of business practices to create the highest level of efficiency possible within an organization. It is concerned with converting materials and labor into goods and services as efficiently as possible to maximize the profit of an organization.”
But what can operations management do for your professional services business and what is its long-term positive impact?
What Does Operations Management Do?
Operations management is largely concerned with planning, organizing, and supervising business processes. When done right, a strong high-level focus on operations management can have widespread positive effects across a business at all levels of work.
An operations management function works to control the flow of resources at a business, both the people and the physical resources that must be used to do work. This management function organizes the people, equipment, technology, information, and more that are needed to succeed. By having a core operations management system that works to support your resources, your projects, and every function across the business that works in concert with these elements, businesses get a higher degree of control over their performance.
The Positive Impact of Operations Management
Service Performance Insight, which conducts an annual benchmark survey of the professional services industry, visualizes the processes that control many of a professional services organizations’ most important key performance indicators (KPIs) as a set of gears that need to rotate in sync in order to drive desired outcomes like higher margins, client satisfaction, and growth (see image below). A professional services organization is composed of many different gears that are always turning – the sales team is selling, the staffing team is staffing, delivery teams are delivering, and the back office is managing the flow of costs and revenue. However, these gears aren’t necessarily always turning together in the most efficient manner, and when there’s friction between essential gears, a business isn’t the well-oiled machine it needs to be to achieve consistent results.
Operations management provides the big picture oversight that’s necessary for every team in a business to work toward the best possible outcome together. As such, it’s important that organizations make an effort to understand what forms of operations management are currently in play within their organization already. Is there a dedicated operations manager for your professional services organization? What operations management duties have been assigned to different team members in the company? Are there operations management processes that are already in place to oversee how work gets done in the organization?
If roles and processes are not clear, it can be impactful to set aside the time to clarify them and ensure a systematic approach to operations management going forward. Having these roles and responsibilities in place has the potential to substantially improve the trajectory of your business by ensuring there is a guiding vision and coordination surrounding operations. When combined with a software solution that supports the core workflows that drive the professional services project lifecycle, strategic operations management provides greater control over and insight into business processes. For businesses looking to foster resilience and predictability amidst economic uncertainty, a more strategic approach to operations management is a surefire way to improve performance.
What Can Kantata Operations Management Do For You?
The Kantata Professional Services Cloud makes it easy to drill down into demand, find your best team, and optimize your resources for better client outcomes. Learn how streamlining operations management with Kantata can unlock greater clarity, control, and confidence.