On February 8, 2013, Service Performance Insight (SPI) released the 2013 Professional Services Maturity(tm) Benchmark.  The report analyzes data from 234 organizations and 55,000 consultants that participated in a 2013 survey, and comparative data from five years of past survey data.  SPI is a global research, consulting and training company.

Some interesting findings from the report include:

• The professional services market is growing, staff turnover rates are down, and profits are up. According to SPI, the professional service market is in good shape, with high levels of growth across all market segments. (Service Performance Insight (SPI) 2013, 6)
• Agile project management practices along with technology advancements and client demands have resulted in a trend towards smaller project team sizes. The average team size in 2012 was 3.7 people, 6% lower than 2011 and 2011 was 7% lower than the past years.
• 30% of the surveyed organization have adopted commercial Business Intelligence software. SPI speculates that rich reporting and analysis solutions integrated into the professional service automation systems is one reason for the low adoption of commercial BI solutions. Larger practices (average size 516 people) are more likely than smaller practices (average size 91 people) to use commercial BI solution. Compared with non-users, BI-users had a higher return and revenue per employee and were more likely to reach their revenue and margin targets.

References

Service Performance Insight (SPI) . 2013 Professional Services Maturity(tm) Benchmark. Research , Ohio: Service Performance Insight (SPI), 2013. http://www.spiresearch.com/spi-research/reports/2013psmb.html