5 Must-know trends for 2025 in project delivery and professional services ops

1. Finance is king

The role of the CFO has evolved. CFOs are no longer just focused on financial oversight; they are now strategic leaders, guiding business decisions through data and risk management. 

As a result, CFOs now have different expectations from PS leaders, and it’s important to adjust how you operate to meet these expectations.

As a PS leader, you need to:

Demonstrate your focus on profitability: CFOs care deeply about profitability and unit economics. This means knowing your numbers inside and out—not just overall margins, but the profitability of specific projects, accounts, and resource allocations. 

This means visibility into granular details like:

• Are your junior resources profitable?
• How do your rates affect margins?
• What trends are emerging by geography or offering type?

At a broader level, you also need to have answers for big-picture questions like:

• How is your service delivery impacting the company’s bottom line?
• Are you driving product usage, renewals, or reducing churn? 
• How can you tie your work to customer business outcomes?

‍Slice and dice your financial data to spot patterns: Use the right tools to:

• Track trends: Look at how your performance evolves quarter-over-quarter or across geographies.
• Segment results: Analyze your data by customer type, project category, or specific offerings to see what’s working and where there’s room to improve.
• Collaborate with ops and data teams: Show how specific services correlate with customer growth. For example, "customers who used X service grew by Y% more than others.

Don’t wait for escalations: Proactively managing project challenges starts with monitoring budget health alongside project progress. 

One way to do this is to set budget alerts using your Professional Services Automation  (PSA) system. For example, if the solutioning phase consumes over the budget, trigger a Slack notification and flag the project as amber or red. Collaborate with the team to resolve issues and, if needed, realign with the customer to keep the project on track.

Give away less for free: The tug-of-war between PS, CS, and sales over offering free services isn’t going away. To manage this tension:

• Establish a budget for non-billable work: Allocate and define a specific percentage of productive utilization, such as 10-20%, for free work. 
• Treat free work bandwidth as a resource to be earned: Create a competitive process where teams or leaders pitch their cases for utilizing the budget. Use a structured approach, like a quarterly “shark tank” within the company, to evaluate and prioritize these requests.

To see how you can have better conversations with your CFO, watch Brian Hodges, President of nCloud Integrators, share strategies to boost PS margins, utilization, and profitability on RocketlaneTV

2. Increased buyer skepticism 

Today’s buyers are more skeptical than ever, often willing to abandon a partnership at the first sign of trouble. 

In such an environment, you need to consistently reinforce your partnership and prove your ability to deliver.

Here are some guidelines to help you do this:

1. Show ownership and take a prescriptive stance: It’s easy to blame clients for delays—whether it’s slow responses, missing inputs, or their operations teams not being available. But customers now expect you to operate in a way where the ball is always in your court. Instead of waiting for them to make decisions, take responsibility for driving the process forward.
2. Simplify decision-making: Present options to your customers, but don’t overwhelm them with choices. Follow up intensely on any outstanding items, and escalate issues faster – even if you're looking at day-long delays.
3. Make the most of governance automation: Automate governance processes to catch issues early. At Rocketlane, for example, we use an internal Slack channel for onboarding escalations. If something is missed—even by a day—our team responds quickly to get it back on track. 

1. Map your deliverables to the customer’s desired outcomes: Customers today don’t care if you put in 35 hours or 60 hours—they care about the impact. 

Stay focused on the key initiatives that will drive results. If the project is veering off course with additional features or dashboards, it’s your responsibility to bring the focus back to the customer’s core objectives.

1. Make progress visible and easily accessible: Make sure both the client’s point of contact (POC) and executive sponsors are aware of what’s being delivered. Often, executives aren’t fully aware of the work happening beneath them.  Tools like Rocketlane’s Customer Portal provide a clear, accessible view of what’s been accomplished, what’s planned, and what’s next. 
2. Build strong governance processes – and talk about them: The foundation of building trust is a strong governance framework. When you establish strong governance and consistently demonstrate your ability to manage the project effectively, you show the customer that you’re the right partner. 

3. Post-sale leadership re-organization is at an all-time high

Leadership turnover in post-sale teams is at an all-time high. There are new expectations for leaders, pushing them to be more proactive and future-oriented.

Gone are the days when leadership success was measured by just keeping the team happy, hiring more people, or meeting set metrics. 

Today, leaders now need to:

1. Understand the future direction of the company: Develop initiatives that are aligned with what matters most for the next phase of growth.

Ensure that every action today is linked to the business’s goals for tomorrow.

For instance, if your company is approaching Series D, start thinking about partner delivery models and scaling with external partners. If you're generating $4 million in services revenue, it’s time to focus on margin management and financial sustainability.

1. Find new ways to create value for customers beyond the initial implementation: Explore new service offerings like optimization or consulting services to bridge gaps and help customers achieve success on your platform.

For example, Rocketlane introduced a takeover offering for customers switching from legacy competitors. This was targeted at customers who liked the solution but were hesitant to switch because it seemed like a big task. Clearly defining the service and de-risking the process made it easier for customers to make the move.

Some potential areas to explore additional value include:

• AI-driven offerings like migration services, which can shorten timelines and reduce customer risk
• Partner-led delivery models to scale without the need for significant internal team expansion
• Subscription or recurring services models to provide ongoing value to customers and create steady revenue streams

4. Change is the new norm

Things are changing rapidly; be willing to adapt every quarter. Agility and foresight in how you approach service delivery. Here's how you can adapt:

1. Proactively anticipate customer needs: Customers are changing too. Many are evolving from serving small, velocity-driven clients to focusing on enterprise-level customers. This means you may need to some text
   • Offer reimplementation services or new engagement plans to align with their growth and evolving goals.
   • Monitor key triggers like leadership changes or major business events. For instance, after an acquisition, anticipate data integration challenges and position yourself as the go-to resource for configuring dashboards or reports.
2. Get additional operational support: If you don’t have the right internal resources to keep up with changes, consider bringing in an external operations partner. Whether full-time or part-time, a partner can help you implement process improvements, governance strategies, and new offerings. They act as a forcing function to ensure progress, especially when your internal team is stretched thin.
3. Accelerate change: Now is not the time to be bogged down by outdated tools or processes. Work around system limitations if necessary to implement changes quickly and efficiently.

Take ownership of improvements, even if other departments have competing priorities.

1. Keep leadership informed: Keep leadership updated regularly with data, insights, and the actions you're taking.  For example, highlight:some text
   • Financial adjustments: If senior resources are underperforming financially, share the corrective steps you’re taking.
   • Scaling success: Highlight successful offerings and the support you need from sales to expand them.
   • Operational bottlenecks: Identify patterns like delayed implementation phases or escalated accounts, and outline your mitigation strategies.

Be ready to showcase the patterns you've identified, the changes you propose, and how those changes will impact the business. 

5. The emergence of ‘intelligent’ organizations

AI-driven companies are redefining how delivery teams operate, setting a new standard for efficiency and effectiveness. 

Your delivery team must evolve into an intelligent delivery organization to stay competitive.

But becoming an "intelligent” organization isn’t just about adopting AI – it’s also about automation, templatization, and productivity.

To build an intelligence delivery organization, you need to: 

1. Reimagine what you deliver and how: Use AI to change both the nature of your offerings and the speed at which you deliver. For example, a traditionally long project (e.g., two years) can be shortened to a few months with AI tools, increasing speed while unlocking greater value for customers.
2. Enhance delivery efficiency: Automate governance processes and ensure that deliveries follow strict protocols, reducing delays and risks. You can apply AI to increase productivity, such as enabling project managers to handle more projects by automating administrative tasks like scheduling or resource allocation. Leverage AI for smarter resource allocation and project profitability. 

You can also use AI to forecast project risks, identify profitable projects, and allocate resources accordingly.

1. Automate processes and create templates: Build templates for standard tasks like project plans, emails, escalation communications, and reports. This ensures consistency and reduces manual effort across your team. Automating tasks like the creation of SOWs (Statements of Work) or custom data transformations can free up time for more strategic activities. These templates can also extend to how you handle customer intake, manage handoffs, or approach escalations.
2. Encourage ‘tinkerers’: Invest in team members who can think critically about processes and experiment with new AI tools. Encourage them to explore new ways to apply AI and automation, testing tools like ChatGPT for generating documents, or improving the way your team collaborates. Even if some experiments fail, this approach will drive valuable insights and improvements.
3. Equip your team with smarter tools: Focus on creating smarter internal tools. Build systems that enable your teams to query data across various systems efficiently. This can streamline decision-making, improve project management, and make your team more agile. Review your PSA tools for key capabilities and ensure they align with your AI strategy.