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Catalog Your IT Consulting and Managed Services

Build a customer-facing menu of services to streamline service delivery and scale your business.

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You’re saying yes to everything. If a customer asks for it, you’ll deliver it.

Your sales staff can’t explain what you do and are challenged with specifically articulating what value your customers will get.

Your service delivery can’t scale because it is comprised of heroes who are performing miracles for customers.

Your business is not growing, and your service is not scaling because you haven’t nailed down specifically what you will and will not do.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

The methodology for cataloging consulting engagements differs from that of cataloging managed services. If your organization offers both consulting and managed services, do not attempt to catalog them all at once. Use our distinct methodology for each service type and present both catalogs to your customers in a unified service portfolio.

Impact and Result

  • It is clear whether you need a consulting service catalog or a managed service catalog, or both.
  • Your staff have a resource to help explain what you do and what value your customers will get from you.
  • Customers are clear on your product.

Catalog Your IT Consulting and Managed Services Research & Tools

1. Catalog Your IT Consulting and Managed Services Storyboard – A step-by-step guide that walks you through the activities of creating a service catalog and relative service records for the services you offer.

Use this guide to walk through Info-Tech's methodology for itemizing a detailed catalog of services that have been fully defined in ways that are much deeper than a mere brochure.

2. Service Catalog Template – A framework for both consulting and managed service offerings.

Use this tool to catalog your IT business' IT consulting engagements, or managed IT services.

3. Service Record Templates – Templates for individual service records within the catalog.

These support the activities for standardizing the services, and ensuring they are repeatable, scalable, and serviceable.

Unlock a Free Sample

Catalog Your IT Consulting and Managed Services

Build a customer-facing menu of services to streamline service delivery and scale your business.

Analyst Perspective

A technology firm without a customer-facing service catalog is like a restaurant without a menu.

Fred Chagnon.

It seems obvious that an organization ought to state specifically what it does prior to entering the business of actually doing it. But reality is much more complicated than that. Many IT consulting and managed services firms are held back because they are missing a critical piece of business infrastructure: a service catalog.

In IT consulting, we often see service catalogs employed by boutique firms who specialize in a certain area and want to stay in their lane. But as we look across the spectrum to larger firms, the specificity of engagements offered starts to blur, with one such partner claiming “We’re in the consulting business. Consulting is our service.”

Research from the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) showed that 77% of managed service providers (MSPs) had a service catalog in place. Yet, in our advisory experiences, the catalog coded into their PSA software doesn’t align directly to the services listed on the website. Somewhere along the way, those two sources of truth drifted apart.

This research reveals two distinct methodologies. The first will aid in the discovery, categorization, and documentation of a service catalog for project-based consulting engagements; the other, in the discovery, bundling, and describing of the services offered by a retained managed services offering. Broadly these processes are the same, but there are sufficient nuances within each that warrants separating them.

And as we continue to see many MSPs offering consulting and professional services, as much as consulting firms seeking retained managed engagements, we foresee many of our partners benefiting from both activities.

Fred Chagnon
Principal Research Director, Consulting and IT Services Industry
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Common Obstacles

Info-Tech’s Approach

You’re saying yes to everything. If a customer asks for it, you’ll deliver it.

Your sales staff can’t explain what you do and are challenged with specifically articulating what value your customers will get.

Your service delivery can’t scale because it is comprised of hero workers performing miracles for customers.

Your business is not growing, and your service is not scaling because you haven’t nailed down specifically what you will and will not do.

Some fear that publishing a service catalog means turning away business that isn’t in the catalog. But a well-defined service catalog is an effective lead-generating tool, fueling the content for marketing and sales collateral.

Lack of product and service design experience makes the construction of a service catalog extremely difficult.

Trying to consolidate various types of services into a single catalog is, at times, inappropriate; in many cases it can halt the process in its tracks.

Even while many organizations dabble in both IT consulting and managed IT services, the creation of the catalogs for these two distinct business models are fundamentally different exercises. However, they have similar steps.

  1. Start at the end. Define the deliverable(s) and outcomes first.
  2. Decompose the service. Determine the activities, potential scope variables, and constraints for each service.
  3. Set the price based on knowledge of the internal costs of offering the service

Info-Tech Insight

A service catalog is like a menu, and therefore needs to be designed to be consumed by the customer. In order to finalize a menu, many non-customer facing details need to be ironed-out. But just as you won’t see the full ingredient list and cooking instructions on a menu, neither should you publish the technical underpinnings of your managed services, or the step-by-step processes of your consulting engagements.

What is a service catalog?

The service catalog is a collection of briefly described and categorized services available to a customer. That’s it!

Service: Simply put, a service is the creation of value for a customer. Value is determined by the service’s functional utility, as well as its quality.

Service Portfolio: Where a catalog represents a list of services that are actively available to customers, a service portfolio extends to services that have been retired or are currently in development. The practice of continually updating the portfolio and maintaining its relevance is called service portfolio management.

Service Catalog.

Catalogs for IT consulting firms differ from those of managed service providers

A consulting firm’s service catalog will be more focused on the engagements it can offer, whereas an MSP’s catalog will detail the inclusions to its bundled offerings.

Consulting services

Managed services

Focused on individual set pieces: Orderable items are titled, briefly described, and appropriately categorized.

A-la-carte pricing: Pricing is either established as a set fee or a clearly articulated set of add-ons. Or simply labeled “Market price (contact us for an assessment!).”

Focused on a bundled service: Inclusions are pre-established and described. The customer doesn’t order specific items. Rather, they are consuming a ready-made operation.

All-inclusive pricing: Pricing is typically all-inclusive based on scaling unit (a person, device, etc.).

The absence of a service catalog can confuse customers and frustrate colleagues

Customer-facing challenges

Unclear value leading to lost business or prolonged sales cycle: Customers can’t clearly see what services are available to them and the value those services would provide. They do not have an easy way to request access to a service. Customer inquiries must be frequently scoped and assessed, prolonging the sales cycle.

Inconsistent service delivery: The customer experience is varied from service to service because the internal operations processes have not been anchored into a repeatable procedure.

Internal business challenges

Unclear value: Sales staff are confused and perhaps ill-informed. When too many services are offered in different ways, the sales team is unable to clearly and confidently sell the services to their next prospect.

Inconsistent service delivery: Delivery staff are delivering variations of a service in their own way, which duplicates effort, wastes time, and ultimately erodes the profitability of the service.

Defining a service catalog will create the following outcomes in your business

Trying to implement too many services at once can be overwhelming for both the business and its customers.

Shortened sales cycle: A good catalog will help your sales team articulate not only the services but also the value they create.

Increased customer leads: When published as a brochure, a clear customer-facing catalog is an effective lead-generating tool, clarifying to prospective customers what it is you do.

Accelerated digital enablement: A defined catalog is a critical foundation for streamlining service requests, through to invoicing, in an automated digital way.

Improved employee and customer satisfaction: Employees are more able to deliver on clear services that align with goals, which leads to their own satisfaction. And happy employees typically mean happy customers.

A service catalog is a tool for the continuous evolution of your services

The image contains a screenshot of an image that demonstrates a service catalog being a tool for the continuous evolution of services.

Consulting services and managed services are not the same thing

Recognizing the differences between these two common product types is fundamental to ensuring that these services are appropriately cataloged.

Consulting engagements

Managed services

  • Service Type: Projects with defined start and end states. Not a retained service.
  • Price and Billing Model: Priced based on time and materials or a flat fee. Billed based on outcomes at project close or at defined project milestones.

Examples:

  • IT Strategy and Roadmap Development
  • Migration to Microsoft 365
  • Penetration Testing

Service catalog attributes:

  • Deliverable(s)
  • Activities
  • Variables
  • Constraints

Service Type: Retained/recurring service

Price and Billing Model: Priced as a flat fee (sometimes based on a scaling unit such as number of users or devices). Billing at defined intervals (monthly, quarterly, annually).

Examples:

  • Managed network and infrastructure services
  • Remote helpdesk
  • Virtual CIO/Virtual CISO advisory services
  • Managed security operation center/ managed detection and response

Service catalog attributes:

  • Service instantiation tasks
  • Service delivery tasks
  • Supporting/Enabling services

Info-Tech Insight

The methodology for cataloging consulting engagements differs from that of cataloging managed services. If your organization offers both consulting and managed services, do not attempt to catalog them all at once. Use our distinct methodology for each service type and present both catalogs to your customers in a unified service portfolio.

A consulting service catalog is like a restaurant menu

The services provided by consultants should be presented in categories, with the outcomes and benefits briefly described.

Determine the restaurant style and the items on the menu.

Establish the recipe for the items, refine your kitchen operations, and confirm your supply lines.

Document the items in the customer-facing menu, along with their price.

1. Service discovery and identification

2. Service classification and standardization

*Often Skipped!

3. Service description

The Info-Tech methodology for designing a service catalog for consulting:

  1. Align to business goals.
  2. Discover past, present, and future engagements.
  3. Categorize engagements into service lines.
  1. Determine the key deliverable(s) and outcome(s) of the engagement.
  2. Identify all the activities that are performed in the service.
  3. Identify the variables that affect the execution time of the service.
  4. Identify the constraints on the delivery of the service.
  5. Identify service cost factors.
  1. Document the service’s brief description.
  2. Document the service’s key benefits.
  3. Optionally, post the service’s price.
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About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

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Author

Fred Chagnon

Contributors

Ken Muir, CISO, LCM Security

Search Code: 102640
Last Revised: August 10, 2023

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