Clients and Consultants Working Together – part two
It was interesting to read what others had to say about my recent posting of a similar title. Some felt that the posting was skewed towards the view of clients by consultants. Some thought I was being cute. Interestingly, I was actually reporting behaviors I've witnessed in my career across several consulting firms and at numerous client organizations. To that end, I've seen some outrageous behavior by both clients and consultants. I'm not picking on or defending either camp. I'm just a bystander who's amazed at what goes on when the most irrational of creatures, human beings, get together in a work/team environment.
In this posting, I would like to give space to how clients sometime view consultants.
- “Wait a minute - you’re not the consultants we hired!”- Clients are really quite savvy. They know that the team they hired should be the team that shows up on the job site. When you send in a team that bears no resemblance to the one you proposed, you are guilty of something. At the least, you’re a bad business person. At worst, you’re dishonest, deceitful and maybe guilty of fraud. Habeas Corpus – We command you to produce the body!
- “We hired senior people – you gave us green beans!” – Seriously, where are all those gray-haired people that you listed in your proposal? You know, the ones who were supposed to cost $400-$800 per hour? These were the people who had all of that vertical/industry or technical knowledge that we found so valuable. Why should we accept fresh new college students as replacements for the senior team you proposed? Clients can sense bait and switch tactics and they will object to their usage.
- “Why can’t you keep your people on this project?”- It is really insulting to clients to suggest that another client’s needs are more important than yours. When you pull staff from one project team to send to a “more worthy” client, what does that really say about your current client relationship? If a client has negotiated with a consultancy in good faith, they should receive the personnel they contracted for the entire expected duration of their stay. Sure, consulting firms can come up with all sorts of rationale why they need to relocate one person or another to other client engagements, but the bottom line is these conversations should have occurred before the client signed this deal.
- “Why do you have such high turnover?”- Retention is a significant issue for many consultancies, integrators and offshore service providers. Clients cannot understand how a company can experience 12 - 25% attrition and remain in business. Clients have no responsibility to solving a consulting firm’s attrition problems. If the consulting firms abuse their people, leave them stranded in remote out-of-town engagements for years on end, underpay them, etc., then why should these consultants have any loyalty to these firms? Retention is only possible when consulting firms strike realistic staffing assignments with their people and discuss these in advance with clients.
- “Why doesn’t your staff already know this stuff?” – When client personnel have to teach consultants most everything they need to know, something’s really amiss. If an integrator’s personnel need to bring their training manuals to your job site, you got ripped off. If the integrator or outsourcer staff need to shadow the client staff for more than a few minutes, they probably lack critical skills.
In the final analysis, more could be done to make mixed teams work better together. First, some basic empathy for the other party would go a long way to developing better teams and better outcomes. Second, when team members find that the other parties are people of integrity and can be trusted, more than morale is improved. Third, accountability is something both clients and consultants should demand from each other. If either side is allowed to 'get away with less than quality deliverables or miss key deadlines, then trust is destroyed.
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