Four Centers, Four Ways of Delivering.

Four centers, four ways of delivering

When I joined, the company was doing about $20 million a year with roughly 160 people and around 40 client engagements running at once. The two founders ran it. The CEO had sales, temporarily, until a full-time CRO came on. The COO carried all of operations and delivery.

Delivery ran out of each location, and there was no single way of doing the work. There were four delivery centers, and I ran one of them. That meant four ways of managing a project, four ways of measuring it, four ways of describing an issue, and four ways of onboarding a new person. The weekly meetings were status meetings, and each center reported in its own language.

When something went wrong, the escalation went to a group of two or three senior people, and it was never quite clear which of them owned it. Escalation was a group effort. Delivery wasn't.

Every client judged the whole company by one project

At that stage of growth, everything carries a cost, and this one compounded. A client who bought a couple of services and got uneven delivery decided that was the whole company. Clients who could have been satisfied, and might have bought much more, never got the chance to see what else the firm could do.

There was no consistent way to measure quality, or even to apply quality methods across the centers. And the two founders were playing double and triple duty, trying to be everything to everyone, from projects to clients to culture.

A fix that only half took

The first big move was the right idea: a vice president role that owned how the company delivered to its clients. I was promoted into it from my center director seat, but the role was split between me and another VP with a very different approach, so it never built momentum. We sort of did it.

We also had some quality and delivery frameworks, but they weren't shared. The centers had been encouraged to develop their own personalities, and as each one took responsibility for its work, the work reflected how that center did it, not how we did it. That was a costly mistake, and it slowed the company's maturity. I later took on the full function as the only person in the role, and it's the lesson I bring to every engagement now: until there's one way "we" do it, growth multiplies the differences.

One way we do it, built by our own people

Leaders from inside. Once we committed to one way of delivering, we started finding the internal leaders who could build it. Naming a director of quality was a big step. That person worked across the company to set the quality metrics, how they'd be tracked, how we'd read them, and how they would benefit clients.

One project management framework. We did the same for project management. We had plenty of strong voices with experience on successful projects and, more usefully, on projects that had gone off track. Their experience became the framework.

Account management as its own job. Once we had a real handle on where every project stood, we could separate account management from project management. Someone could focus on the client and growing the account without also running the project.

Roles we didn't know we needed. This is where the effects of scale showed up. We started recognizing roles we hadn't created yet, and we built a career track for delivery people, partly to keep good people and partly so we could show future hires there was a path here, not just a seat.

Honest conversations about leadership. There was pushback. Some people wanted leadership roles they weren't ready for, and how we handled that mattered. Sometimes the answer was "you're not there yet." That led to leadership and mentoring programs that put people who wanted to grow close to senior and principal leaders who could guide them.

One definition of utilization, then a smaller bench

With the structure in place, we could go deeper on the data. The first win was simply agreeing on what utilization meant and how we would manage with it. About 76% utilization turned out to be roughly break-even. Working with the CFO's numbers, we tied that to the budget and then to demand planning, so headcount followed real demand.

Over 12 to 16 months, we reduced the bench by 8%, which added 2 points to the bottom line.

Once those numbers were trusted, the client management group started tracking NPS. Over six to eight months, NPS rose by 2 points, and more importantly we knew where each relationship stood and where it needed work. Project managers and delivery executives saw the scores too, so they knew how clients saw them and could act on it. It became a shared system for keeping relationships healthy and growing accounts.

A system that could absorb a whole company

Then the company started acquiring. Every acquisition has its challenges, but by now our delivery and execution were documented, and we had a clear way of understanding people's skills and performance, which matters most when new people arrive all at once. By the fourth acquisition, we could chart a 90-day path that handled about 80% of the integration:

• Project transitions
• Project communication
• Colleague awareness
• Onboarding
• New client communications

The company grew from about $20 million to $150 million and from 160 people to about a thousand. More than 100 engagements ran at the same time on one delivery framework, one set of quality measures, and one reporting rhythm.

The biggest change was at the top. With delivery off their plates, the founders could act strategically as growth opportunities arrived. That mattered in several key client acquisitions, and it freed them to lead the geographic expansion that became a catalyst for the company's growth.

Off their plate

• Being the escalation path for every project that went sideways.
• Hearing four different versions of delivery status every week.
• Holding delivery quality together through personal attention.