The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

While I can't speak directly for any of my readership that also toils in the consulting services sector of our business, this time-of-year is historically for me, my least favorite. That's because leading up to the holiday season, its time for most of us to get new business lined up for 2007 in addition to continuing client work from this year.

I respect the sales & marketing side of this and any business - a vital and necessary function to develop and sustain revenue streams and thus, livelihood. What makes me shake my head over and over, every year, is the wishful thinking and hoping certain organizations present when discussing projects and plans for the upcoming year.

For example:

• Client furnishes 3 cryptic pages of documentation and a diagram of a data warehouse (full of unexplained acronyms with no SME around to de-cypher) asking for a labor estimate on conceptual and logical data modeling work. After client receives an estimate (and deviation) full of the necessary disclaimers regarding said estimate, asks if adding more modelers to the project would make it 'go faster.'
• Client has hired and fired 3 consulting firms on a specific project for, as they termed it, 'non-performance' over the past 2-3 years. Now they're looking for a fourth and appear a bit evasive when I ask them to describe, in as much detail as they're comfortable with, what went wrong. While one of these firms fits the profile of routinely botching projects and ratcheting up billing for billing's sake (until they get canned or finish the project, whichever occurs first), the other two are very good at what they do and have excellent track records from my direct experiences working with them over the years. Hmmm...I wonder where the real problem lies.
• Another client, a government agency, has 3 RFPs out for bid that they want to close soon. However, the principals on their side keep playing musical chairs with respect to responsibility and the requirements change each time the music stops. Maybe next year. Maybe not.

This isn't a rant about how difficult this time-of-year is in the consulting trade. What's more to the point is how unprepared a lot of organizations are when getting ready to pull the trigger on a major IT project effort with an equally impressive monetary spend. While there are a number of outfits that have their acts together on this (and make it a pleasure to quote and deliver services to them), there are an equal or greater number that don't.

Which brings me to this point: I firmly practice and advocate that any form of documentation - project plan, architecture, design, requirements, RFP, etc. must be, to use a term that lawyers are fond of, actionable by others downstream in the process. There is also a level of responsibility within organizations that must, to the extent possible/feasible, articulate their needs such that reasonable, to-the-point estimates of time and money can be furnished by service providers. The more vague, non-forthcoming, or 'rectally-generated' that all of this is, it should be expected that all estimates, forecasts, and budgets obtained will be equally so.

I have articulated in the past that we never know 100% of the requirements up front before quoting services or proceeding with a project, and that's why time, resource, and budget 'buffers' are set up to account for this. However, the proper amount of ambiguity, confusion, or dysfunction along these lines will result in an 'estimate' that has all of the validity of next week's weather forecast. There's got to be enough 'meat' in a proposal request (coupled with any other discovery and interviewing/coaching) to give our responses the validity that all parties involve deserve and need.

I'm sure that a number of you are thinking, "well, that's all common sense." Truth be told, it is. But it warrants a post on my blog because things like this continue to happen, year-after-year. My question here is simply - what does it take to really facilitate positive change along these lines? Not a silver bullet, that's for sure. Disciplined, expedient, and nuanced approaches perhaps?

Well, as I alluded to above, this 'season' usually ends by the time the holidays approach, then things get rather quiet until the new year. People always wonder why I'm in such a good mood at Thanksgiving...:)

Comments

[James]

So maybe a future blog can be on how customers can tell when they are the problem and not consulting firms?