the technology professional services association

Expertise, Collaboration, Success



Insights, Models and Best Practices
The Technology Professional Services Association (TPSA), founded in September 2005, is the industry’s first and only association focused exclusively on the management needs of technology professional services providers. TPSA provides unique insights, models and best practices that address the industry’s most complex and pressing business challenges.  This page offers you access to examples of the valuable, actionable resources available to TPSA members.

  • In January of 2006, TPSA assembled a new Industry Task Force focused on the challenges of intellectual asset (IA) management for professional service (PS) organizations. The recent article, Project Life Cycle Gaps (.pdf 982kb), by Thomas Lah, documents these common challenges and captures some of the techniques member companies employ to minimize these execution gaps in the project life cycle.

  • “The PS Business Model” (.pdf 173kb) also by Thomas Lah, provides an overview of the importance of defining a financial business model for the PS organization. This article also details how TPSA defines the specific line items of the PS business model for benchmarking purposes.

  • Executives have been extremely handicapped in their ability to understand the performance of other technology PS organizations. To fill this information gap, on a quarterly basis TPSA identifies fifty of the largest providers of technology professional services that report financial data on their service businesses. In July of 2006, TPSA took its fourth official snapshot of the publicly reported financial data.
    The Service 50 (.pdf 403kb)     summarizes the results of this fourth snapshot and offers analysis of the aggregated data.

PS Benchmark Data in Six Disciplines
At the core of the TPSA program portfolio is its Benchmark Study. The study collects critical baseline data in six disciplines of the PS organization: Strategy, Operations, Delivery, Sales, Engineering, and Marketing. This data allows members to make informed decisions and set realistic expectations enabling them to manage and grow their PS businesses faster.

 “This data is unique to TPSA, there is no other source of this information in the industry, and it is giving me a unique perspective on how I can continue to grow and better manage our PS business”

    Tom Roloff, VP and CTO, Technology Solutions, EMC Corporation

Thomas Lah, TPSA Executive Director
TPSA is lead by well-known author, educator, and consultant-in-the-field, Thomas Lah. Lah is known worldwide for his incisive analysis, strategic thinking, and creative solutions. He is the author of the seminal text on technology professional services, Building Professional Services: The Siren’s Song.  His most recent book, Mastering Professional Services, has already become required reading for executives to truly understand service strategies for IT and other product companies.

Service Strategy Board
Using data and analysis supplied by TPSA, the Service Strategy Board is currently defining models and best practices for building, optimizing and managing technology professional services businesses.  Actionable deliverables will include: Maturing Service Strategy in the Technology Industry White Paper, Service Strategy Models and Variables Reference Table, and a presentation on Service Strategy Modeling. The Service Strategy Board is led by Thomas Lah and noted author, Geoffrey Moore, and comprised of executives from TPSA member companies.

Become a TPSA Member
Membership in TPSA provides your company access to our technology professional services expertise, opportunities for collaboration with fellow member companies, and resources to grow and optimize a more successful services organization. To learn more about membership, contact Matt Adame at 858-717-6267 or madame@thesspa.com.