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Professional Services Handbook

The Professional Services team at GitLab is a part of the Customer Success department.

Quick links

Here are links to the most popular Professional Services topics.

• Marketed Offerings
• Offerings Framework & Delivery Kits
• Positioning
• Process and Methodology
  • Go To Market (Pre-Sales)
  • Delivery (Post-Sales)
• Selling
• Working with PS
• SKUs
• Education Services
• GitLab Technical Certifications
• Partner Collaboration
• Sales enablement
• Professional Services Operations
• Escalation Process

On this page

• Quick links
• Team functions
• Direction
  • Mission
  • Goals
• Value of Professional Services
• GitLab Professional Services Methodology
• Team Members
• Team metrics
• Professional Services offerings
• Working with Professional Services

Team functions

The Professional Services team is organized according to specialized functions and responsibilities. Click a Function link below to access details for specific team workflows and responsibilities.

Function	Responsibilities
Delivery	Service delivery planning and execution through specialized engineering team members
Engagement Management	Opportunity and SOW scoping and closing in collaboration with GitLab Sales team members
Instructional Design and Development	Educational content creation, deployment, and maintenance
Practice Management	Definition, planning, go-to-market, and performance for specific categories of professional services offerings
Project Management	Project planning and execution
Professional Services Operations	Project Coordination, scheduling, and backend processes
Professional Services Technical Architect	Team technical leadership, project quality and technical escalations

Direction

Mission

GitLab Professional Services enables customers and partners to realize the full value of GitLab solutions to increase operational efficiencies, deliver better products faster, and reduce security and compliance risks.

Goals

1. Measure benefits of Professional Services’ contributions to product growth, adoption, retention, and time-to-value to drive internal stakeholders (Sales, Product, CS), external customers and partner success
2. Predictably meet or exceed company financial performance goals for Professional Services through services delivery by overachieving project goals while maintaining project profitability targets
3. Increase market opportunities and delivery elasticity by expanding to a partner-leveraged delivery model in order to reach more customers
4. Ensure high-quality service delivery for GitLab direct and partner delivered services

For Success Critera mapped to these goals, check out our FY22 strategy, GitLab Team Members Only.

Value of Professional Services

1. With PS engagement, customers start leveraging the full capabilities of GitLab earlier with improved proficiency, reduced risk, and increased competitive advantage.
2. When engaging with Professional Services, customers adopt at higher rates in both stage expansion and active user growth.
3. Partners benefit from GitLab PS expertise, advocacy and credibility to help grow their business practice while helping improve customer success, and increase ARR.

GitLab Professional Services Methodology

GitLab Professional Services offerings sold and scoped by the PS Engagement Management team in partnership with the GitLab Account teams. Services are delivered directly by GitLab team members or by partners. We are building out the partner selling and delivery process to:

• Ensure we have local coverage globally
• Scale professional services in alignment with GitLab business growth
• Create a partner revenue stream

Team Members

Check out the professional services team page

Team metrics

GitLab Professional Services measures success through tracking business profitability and resource utilization. The targets for FY21 are as follows.

• Long term profitability target: 30% gross margin
• Utilization target: 70% billable hours

Utilization GitLab Professional Services Engineers track and categorize the utilization of their working hours as either Billable utilization or Productive utilization.

• Billable utilization is time worked on defined scope that will be charged to a customer according to a contractual SOW.
• Productive utilization is time worked on assigned tasks that benefit GitLab and GitLab Customers (overall utilization including marketing, sales, general management, training, internal projects, etc.)

We use the following definitions to determine and track utilization.

Metric	Formula/Description	Value
Utilization	(Working Hours ÷ Available Hours) × 100%	varies
Billable Utilization	(Billable Working Hours ÷ Utilization) × 100%	varies
Productive Utilization	(Productive Working Hours ÷ Utilization) × 100%	varies
Available Hours	Total Weekday Hours － Non-Working Hours	1792 hrs
Total Weekday Hours	(8 Hours × 5 days × 52 weeks)	2080 hrs
Non-Working Hours	(Holiday Hours + PTO Hours + Training Hours)	288 hrs
Holiday Hours	11 holidays × 8 hrs/day	88 hrs
PTO Hours	20 PTO days × 8 hrs/day	160 hrs
Training Hours	5 professional development days × 8 hrs/day	40 hrs

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) This performance indicator measures how satisfied our customers are with their interaction with the GitLab PS team. This is based on survey responses from customers sent at the end of each engagement. On a scale of 1-5, if the customer submits a 4 or 5, we consider this Customer to be Satisfied with the services delivered.

Professional Services offerings

GitLab offers a full catalog of professional services including implementation, migration, and education delivered by GitLab experts. Click the links to learn more about our framework and for a detailed listing of our standard SKU offerings.

• PS Offerings Framework
• PS Standard SKUs
• PS Full Catalog

Working with Professional Services

Follow these guidelines for contacting us and ordering Professional Services.