ABSTRACT
Most professional service organizations have evolved day-to-day office systems and administrative procedures to allow them to carry out the tasks and roles required to provide the service to their clients. But is just a set of standard procedure enough for them to provide a ‘quality’ service to these clients? Perhaps in the past the professional firm concentrated too much on the job in hand, and little business planning was carried out in service development. Much business development, if it happened, may have been spontaneous, intuitive, fortuitous, individual or reactive. Clear, firm-wide commitment to agreed objectives perhaps occurred only when the firm was threatened by external pressures or market changes.
