What is Service Productization and How Can It Benefit My Company?

Professional services clients lean on their partners to help them solve some of their toughest challenges. When contracting for a service engagement, clients are often taking a big leap of faith due to the fact that the very nature of services makes them difficult to comprehend—they are intangible and it is often difficult to quantify results. Professional services firms also continue to struggle with project challenges that are a drain on profitability; projects take too long, significant rework is required and exceptions to standard processes are common.

More and more professional services firms are transitioning toward a model of service productization to address many of these challenges. By having pre-defined and clear offerings, it puts the prospective client more at ease during the process.

What does a productized service look like?

A common example of a productized service is rapid start or accelerator packages offered by technology firms to streamline technology implementations. A productized service has some specific characteristics that makes the service more tangible, such as:

• A consistent standard methodology
• Quantifiable costs and demonstrable value (value-based pricing)
• Clear policies, blueprints, templates and tools

It is important to remember that productization of service offerings will differ due to the specific needs of the client.

What is driving service productization?

There are a number of interrelated market challenges that are driving the trend toward productization, including:

• Clients are more demanding than ever before.
• Services are increasingly seen as commodities.
• Projects continue to get more complex.
• Cloud services drive the demand for packaged services.

Download our whitepaper, Turning Your Services into Products, to learn about the benefits of service productization to take your professional services firm to the next level.