Managing Non-Billable Work Effectively, Part 3 of 5

Last week (and the week before) I talked about work given away by project managers and work given away by PSO management. Those types of non-billable work are, in the grand scheme of things, easy to manage. As the PM or PSO manager you can decide how much to give away and can manage expectations accordingly.

In the next couple of weeks, I will share my views on the purpose and challenges associated with work given away by non-PS resources, such as Sales, Sales Management, and Executives. Additionally, I will share many of the ways a PSO manager can manage the often unexpected give-away work that gets promised.

This week, I'll start with a summary of what give away work - given away by non-PS resources, managers, and executives - looks like. Next week, I will start to delve into how you can manage non-billable work more effectively.

Work Given Away by Sales, Sales Management, and Executives
The nature of give-away work from Sales, Sales Managers, and Executives are really the same. So while I called them out separately in Part 1 of this blog series, it makes more sense to discuss the nature of this work from all these sources as one.

In talking with my peers on the PS Village forum, it is clear that embedded PSOs often struggle with managing the non-billable commitments made by individuals outside the PSO. The nature of these commitments tends to fall into two categories:

1. Using PS efforts to “sweeten” a product deal
2. Using PS efforts to gain goodwill with a customer when things go wrong with the product or with services delivered by other departments (such as tech support or customer care)
   

While I agree that there are legitimate reasons for providing PS services to a customer at no additional costs, my research shows that, like non-billable work agreed to by the project team or PS Management, these non-billable commitments are most successful when the PS team is brought in early to conduct proper discovery and scoping just like they would for a billable project. When the PSO is involved in the early discussions, applying their best practices for scoping and delivering a project just like they would for a for-fee project, the customer needs are met at a lower cost to the company and with higher-levels of customer satisfaction.

Problems do arise when commitments are made without the knowledge of the experts who need to deliver against the commitments. Often times, what seems like a "simple" project to a sales manager or executive is really a project measured in months and hundreds of thousands of dollars. When these commitments are made "unexpectedly" the disruptions can cause pain to other projects, the sales pipeline, and the morale of the team.

Additionally, without a proper SOW, managing scope is nearly impossible.

Tune in next week for my thoughts on how to manage give-away work more effectively.