Is measuring bookings, revenue, utlization, and billing rates enough for a PSO?

Traditional Professional Services Organizations (PSO) often measure between 10-30 metrics designed to allow management to evaluate the health of the consulting practice. Among these metrics are:

• Bookings
• Revenue
• Team and Individual Utilization Rates
• Gross and Net Profit Margin
• Revenue per Billable Head

...and the list goes on and on. While these metrics are great indicators of the operational efficiency of your practice, are they really providing you with the insights you need to know if your practice is delivering the right value to your customers and your company alike? Let's face it, these metrics are very inward looking metrics that indicate little, if anything, regarding the affect your practices is having on your customers’ success. Nor do they indicate in any way your practices affect on your company’s ability to grow customers and sell more products.

Shouldn't the role of any PSO be to help customers achieve goals and realize value as it pertains to your products and drive growing adoption of the products offered by your company? Wouldn't it stand to reason, then, that direct PSO bookings, revenue, and profit margin are less important to the evaluation of the practice than the team's ability to drive more adoption of the products, resulting in increased bookings and revenue at a corporate level?

With that said, how do you measure whether a customer is realizing the value they expected and having success with your products? How do you connect the dots between the efforts of the PSO and the bookings, revenue, and profit margin of the company?

Over the next two months, I am conducting research to try to answer those very questions. Essentially, the biggest question on my mind today is: What are the right KPIs and Critical Success Factors for measuring the effectiveness of a PSO. My research will focus on the differences between a SaaS-based PSO and an Enterprise Software-based PSO. One thing is certain from my initial research over the past month...there are a lot of people asking this very question, but few have come up with a quantifiable answer.