How do you mesaure your Consulting Project Success?
The simplest answer is, satisfied customer, on time, on budget delivery. OK, this is good enough to get an outsourced consulting company's pay check.
How about 6 months and 1 year from delivery?
Usually consultants train the employees to manage new applications. More than often, when an issue arises, employees take way too long to troubleshoot and resolve the issue. This leaves a disgruntled user and frustrated IT staff.
How about Managed Services
There is nothing new here, it has been tried and has some success. Managed services never reached the level of general IT consulting. There is a huge potential to break into this market if the value proposition is right.
Consulting + Managed Services = Winning Formula
1. Create a process to invlove manged services as part of development, testing and rolling out into production phase.
2. Develop your own management tools, avoid high price off the shelf tools. What you need is not full fledged, click and fix kind of tools, rather comprehensive view of applications that are being managed. Generate proactive tasks to avoid big problems with automatic issue creation based on thresholds of metrics.
3. Use your knowledge of the application (If you implemented), technology and leverage your tools to affectively manage applications.
4. It is a new stream of revenue.
5. Use subscription pricing - a constant and steady stream of revenue.