Unclassified

Is your team Gold-plating its services?

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Earlier today Kiron D. Bondale posted ‘Avoid Gold-plating Through Agile Delivery‘ on the PM Hut site.

There’s a lot to like about Kiron’s post, and many things in it really resonated with me from a business development perspective, but what I really want to share with you though is this brilliant piece of commentary by Kiron:

“As it is with jewelry, on projects gold-plating is all form with no substance. The increase in costs is rarely justified by the value provided by superficial “bling”.

It could be an analyst adding in requirements which they came up with on their own without ensuring that those are actually required, a developer who introduces a code change or feature they believe is useful without checking with others or a quality control specialist who decides to test above and beyond approved test plans.

Don’t get me wrong – the intentions are usually good and I’ve yet to encounter an instance of gold-plating which was done maliciously. But it doesn’t matter – gold-plating is work creep.”

and ask: “Does any of this sound familiar to you?”

Because I’m guessing that if you are being honest with yourself, it does. And trust me, there’s no quicker death nail in a client relationship than scope creep.

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‘Best’ or ‘Preferred’?

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Trish Carroll, of GALT Advisory, had an article of hers published recently (February 26, but I didn’t get the email notification till today) in the Australasian Law Management Journal‘s Law Management Hub titled: ‘Get up close and personal to improve your business development‘.

While Trish’s article contains a number of really useful tips, I found it notable because of the following very thought provoking line:

“It is not about being the best; it is about being the preferred.”

99 times out of 100, I totally agree with Trish. And it is a really important lesson for high achieving lawyers to learn: being the best at what you do is no longer a guaranteed successful business model. In today’s legal market there are a lot of average lawyers making very serious amounts of money because they are the preferred ‘go to’ lawyer.

The one exception I would make would be for top-end, bet the bank, niche advisory work where being the best still trumps.

So the question you need to be asking yourself everyday is:

“What will I do today that will make me my clients preferred lawyer?”

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Some thoughts on ‘value’

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One of the biggest challenges we face in any professional services organisation is both an understanding of, and an ability to communicate, the value of the service we provide.

To some, “value”…

“…is the difference between a prospective customer’s evaluation of the benefits and costs of one product when compared with others. Value may also be expressed as a straightforward relationship between perceived benefits and perceived costs: Value = Benefits / Cost.”

To others, “value”…

“…is like beauty; it’s in the eye of the beholder (the payer)…it’s not measured by internal costs or profit levels.”

To my mind though, one of the nicest pieces written about the challenges humans face in understanding the value they provide comes from the Japanese artist Mariya Suzuki, who wrote recently:

“I wasn’t very aware of the value of my work until a short while ago. If you asked me about it I would just have said “it’s just a drawing” but now I realise that to get to make that drawing I have invested many years and practice. It wasn’t until people told me not to give everything away for free.

Today, in my starting career as an illustrator, I try to value my work much more.”

Trying to “value my work much more” – getting a better understanding of the overall value my product or service brings to the equation – seems like a good starting point to me.