Francis J Smith

There were multiple players in the European struggle for dominance of North America - Spain, France, England, and mostly forgotten today, although with a legacy in the place names of towns and kills (creeks, ) The Netherlands. The Dutch purchased Manhattan from the Indians in 1626, that famous twenty-four-dollar price tag, and gave it up to the British in 1664. The Dutch settled the Hudson Valley from New Amsterdam (today's Lower Manhattan) to Albany. North of Albany were some few scattered outposts, notably Saratoga and Schenectady, but mostly it was wilderness, the inhospitable (even to the Indians, ) Adirondack Mountains, a vast no-man's land separating the dominant North American empires, the English and the French. Those two powers would engage in a hundred-year struggle for control of the continent. With unimaginable courage, some few men dared venture into the wilderness where the dangers were abundant - wolves, snakes, and most terrifyingly, the Stone Age Indians, fighting with a savage fury to keep what had always been theirs. Men went for a myriad of reasons. For some, it was an escape from stultifying civilization, crude as it was. For others, a chance to get rich, smuggling and trapping. Others went to forget, or to escape, and few had any notion of what they were actually accomplishing - the opening of a continent. One of those men, going for the aforementioned reasons, is our indomitable eighteenth-century protagonist, Ken Kuyler, the Albany-born son of Dutch immigrants.

Although the nature of service delivery varies significantly from profession to profession, the way the service is delivered tends to be fairly consistent among professions—or, at least, it should be. A step-by-step guide, Managing Professional Service Delivery—9 Rules for Success describes in detail how to achieve the internal discipline and control necessary to manage professional service engagements and long-term success in the professional services industry. It details engagement-tested methods for success at every step in delivering a professional service and includes real-life examples from a number of professional service organizations. Here’s What You Get: The steps for how to develop your niche in the marketplaceA structure for how to manage professional service delivery, from start to finishTips on how to set up an environment and develop a culture that will result in superior service delivery—such that the delivery process incorporates rigorous internal discipline and controlDiscussion of rapid implementation and deployment concepts that can be attained without compromising internal discipline and controlExamples of documentation standards for professional service proposals and deliverables (reports)Discussion of application of the 9 Rules for Success in two engagements conducted by the authorsThe authors draw on their many years of experience in the field of management science to lay out procedures, tools, and techniques that address each step of the life cycle of an engagement—from definition of the services to be delivered, to evaluation of the results with the client. They take a back-to-basics approach that can be used in any size organization, from a sole practitioner to a firm of up to 75 practitioners and support staff as well as larger firms that also may be experiencing sustainability issues with their process improvement initiatives. The book guides you—starting with the 9 Rules—through the maze of obstacles in delivering your professional service.