The Seven Principles of Professional Services: A field guide for successfully walking the consulting tightrope

The Seven Principles of Professional Services details the prerequisite knowledge that every consultant must master when delivering complex professional services. Coupled with the author's and his industry colleagues' real life examples of success and failure, these principles provide every consultant with actionable guidance to improve their service quality. Professional services consultants are walking a dangerous high wire between the success of their customers and the ongoing success of their firm. To maintain balance and walk this tightrope successfully, a consultant needs a strong set of principles that can be relied upon in the heat of a customer engagement. Through detailed analysis of his own experience as a consultant, a customer, and a professional services executive, Shane describes in detail the seven principles of professional services that have led him and others to repeated success. If you have been a consultant for ten minutes or ten years, this book will help you assess how well you deliver your service today and enable you to identify ways to elevate it in the future. Doing so will benefit your customer, your firm and your career.

Shane has 20 years experience in the delivery of enterprise professional services. After starting his career as an IBM Technical Project Manager he has continued to work as a leading figure in the professional services community. After spending most of his early career in multi-national enterprises (IBM and SingTel), Shane has spent the second half of his career as an executive turning around professional services organizations within mid-sized and early stage software companies including Vignette Corp., BigMachines (now Oracle) and Badgeville. Shane has successfully led global professional services, support and training teams that have ranged in size from a handful of employees to several hundred. Shane currently works as a VP for Saleforce.com is active in the professional services community as an advisory board member of PS Village. Shane also runs PS Principles, a community forum aimed at assisting all consultants in honing their skills and developing their careers (www.psprinciples.com).