Guides
Practical, honest writing on consolidating your stack, running client work end-to-end, and getting more done with fewer tools. New pieces land here and in the RSS feed.
Every firm has a knowledge repository, and in most of them the most recent useful document is several years old.
A rate is not a price for an hour. It is a price for an hour that also pays for every hour nobody billed, and rate cards that forget the second half are the ones that get discounted away.
Most review in professional services checks whether a document reads well. Very little of it checks whether the conclusion is right.
A client forms their view of a firm in the first six weeks and spends the rest of the engagement confirming it. Very little of that view comes from the deliverables.
Every managed service is bought on the promise of a smooth start and sold on the assurance of a clean ending. Both are contract terms, and both are usually written last.
Services revenue is not booked, it is earned, and the gap between those two words is where most forecasts go wrong.
A services firm sells capacity it has to buy in advance, against demand it cannot see clearly. Everything about resource planning follows from that asymmetry.
The test of a working paper file is whether a competent person who was not there can reach the same conclusion from it. Most files fail that test comfortably.
To the client, work performed by a subcontractor is your work. The contract usually agrees, and the subcontract frequently does not.
By the time an engagement turns red, the decisions that could have saved it were taken six weeks ago.
The information request list is the most underestimated document in professional services. It is usually the critical path, and it is usually written in ten minutes.
Most engagements that finish late were already late by the end of week two, and nobody noticed because nothing had visibly gone wrong.
Every firm has a method. The question is whether it lives in a document people use or in the heads of four people who are always busy.
An information barrier is a promise that two teams in the same firm cannot learn what the other knows. It is only worth as much as its weakest practical control.
An authority matrix nobody can remember is an authority matrix nobody follows, and the exceptions become the process.
Margin is almost never lost in one decision. It is lost in a series of small, individually defensible concessions that nobody adds up until the engagement closes.
Engagements rarely end. They fade, leaving open access, unbilled time, undocumented lessons and a client relationship nobody has closed the loop on.
The most expensive words in professional services are "we just need one more pass". Acceptance criteria exist to make that sentence answerable.
The test of a steering committee is simple: count the decisions it took last quarter. If the answer is none, it is a reporting meeting with an expensive attendance list.
Four registers, four different questions, four different owners. Most RAID logs fail because they answer all four with the same list.
A firm can hit its utilisation target every month and still lose money on every engagement. The three measures only mean something together.
Scope creep is rarely a client behaving badly. It is almost always two organisations holding different pictures of the same sentence, discovered late.
A status report is not a record of activity. It is a request for the client to do something, wrapped in enough context to make the request reasonable.
Most client portals fail in one of two directions: they show so little that nobody logs in, or so much that every internal note becomes a conversation.
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