A learning model for professional services organizations

It sure would be nice to have a manual.
It shouldn't be that hard for our groups to make one.

I'm sure many of us would say that our organizations do not provide us with sufficient training for us to be truly great at our jobs.  They also don't provide us enough knowledge-sharing and partering abilities with our peers. 

I just recently started a job that had next to no training provided to me.  Without it, I had to go find people and resources on my own to give myself even a small clue of what I needed to do.  And even then I didn't have enough information and it made it way more complicated than it needed to be.
While there, though, some colleagues and I built a model that provided us the training we knew we all needed.  We saw training being delivered in three levels: A) our roles B) our accounts and finally C) our projects. 

Role level.  We agreed that by first focusing on our roles, we would be able to help each other become excellent at what we do, individually.

Account level.  We next decided to focus on our customers and accounts.  We felt that the politics and preferences of our customers mattered a great deal and that there was a big need for teammates to be trained on accounts.

Project level.  The final thing we knew we'd need to focus on was our projects.  We agreed that our projects should be the simple part of this.  We all know what we have to deliver and fit in, so the training here really should be minimal.

By training and accumulating knowledge at these three levels a professional services organization can learn, continuously improve, and deliver the maximum values to its customers.

Think of services instead of projects

Hitting the drum once is fun and nice and all (and important)
but playing a sweet drum solo is really what you prefer.

Projects are a convenient way to think about things: they have a beginning, middle, and an end.  How cute.  But the truth is, though, that we shouldn't want to think about the end because this means no pay and no relationship!  I'm not talking about death or anything that serious here, I'm talking about the end of our projects when the value has been delivered and the relationship with the customers and project team is over.  What I'm trying to get at here is that we should rather think in terms of long term and strategic (at the program and account level) than at the project level. 

All this said, we really can't have long-term and strategic without projects and immediate value delivery mechanisms.  The truth is that most value is and can be delivered through projects but we have to learn and enact ways to do projects continuously and forever for our customers.  This takes teams to do. 

Let's start imagining things that are built to last and repeat forever rather than one and done.  Forget the old-school ways.