I’ve sat in more than a few board meetings where a well-meaning executive, fresh from reading an article about Silicon Valley, holds up their phone and asks, “Why can’t we be more like them? Why aren’t we using the same tools as Google or Amazon?” The pressure is immense. We see these tech giants as the pinnacle of success, and it’s natural to want to emulate their playbook. But for those of us leading professional services firms, this is a dangerous and costly trap. Trying t

We’ve all been there. The project plan, once a pristine Gantt chart full of promise, is now a sea of red. The go-live date is slipping, the client is getting anxious, and the team is burning out. The first reaction is to find a culprit. We blame the PSA tool for not being intuitive enough, the client for endless scope creep, or the sales team for setting unrealistic expectations. It’s a familiar cycle of frustration. But after three decades in this business, I’ve learned that

I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count over my 30 years in this business. A project forecast looks a little too good to be true, or a resource plan just doesn’t pass the sniff test. As a service delivery leader, you develop a gut feeling for these things - an intuition built on a thousand past projects, both triumphs and failures. Today, however, we’re being told to trust the algorithm. The promise of Artificial Intelligence in our PSA tools is immense: perfectly opt