INNOVATION IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
This award is presented to the professional services (PS) organization that has most clearly and effectively embraced innovation, or undertaken a specific, innovative initiative to increase consultant productivity, project performance, customer satisfaction or other measure of PS business success.
Judging Criteria:
Overview
Please provide a brief overview of your STAR Awards submission including why you feel you have the winning entry.
Describe the innovation that is the basis of your STAR Award application.
People
Document evidence of the impact of the innovation on practices for hiring, training, scheduling, monitoring, and/or coaching/developing personnel. Include such metrics as revenue generated, employee productivity, employee satisfaction, project manager/consultant turnover, or other measure of success in people management.
Process
Describe how the innovation resulted in changes to common PS business process flows, such as resourcing, project management, project change requests, or knowledge capture and publishing.
Technology
Provide an overview of either the role that services technology (PSA software, for example) played in the deployment of the innovation, or the impact of the innovation on the current services technology suite, or both.
Change Management
Describe how organizational change management issues related to the innovation were planned for and successfully overcome.
Customer Impact of Innovation
Provide metrics-based evidence of actual positive customer impact related to the innovation, using improvements in such typical measures as customer satisfaction or project schedule performance. Applicants are also encouraged to submit other evidence of beneficial customer impact, such as more effective performance in managing project change requests.
Business Impact of Innovation
Document both planned and actual business impacts. Include metrics that demonstrate one or more of the following outcomes: actual cost savings, increased profitability, efficiency gains, additional (pull-through) product and/or service revenues, account growth, or other material business benefit from the innovation.
What Are Your Lessons Learned?
Please describe the lessons learned from implementing your innovation in professional services plan.
What Are Your Next Steps?
No process is ever complete. Looking beyond your current success, identify your next set of goals in order to refine and improve this plan.
Summary
Please provide a summation of your application—a “closing argument”—including why you believe you should win in this category.