Whenever I see some scenarios in my Profession I remember an old story. One guy goes to jungle and prays the God for years. Once he fulfills the God's satisfaction, the God appears and gives him a boon. The guy asks the God to grow some hair in the ears of his maternal uncle. There is a logic, even if stupid. The guy having such maternal uncle with hair in the ear, gets lot of wealth. The wish is still with no logic because when the god offered a boon, the guy could directly ask for wealth instead of sounding ridiculous.
Many of my stakeholders also do the same. Instead of stating the business problem they directly ask you to do what they perceive as a solution. Consultants many times also accept to do with a directive that the Customer is right. The Consultants however forget that they are the experts and the customer looks for their advice and not to follow the advice. In this process the business requirement may or may not be met. And even if met, the important parameters like Total Cost of ownership could be impacted.
The Customers who have some technical knowledge are prone to be trapped into arriving at (perceived) solution without even defining the Problem. That is when the Consultants need to ask more questions to understand the Business Problem first and than arriving at solution.
Now there is also a challenge of doing this without hurting the Techno savvy customer. The consultant hence needs to come back with his understanding of Business Problem and many alternative solutions including what Customer has already suggested. The Consultant needs to provide the PROS and CONS for each of the alternative so that the customer him/herself will come back and narrow down to the right solution.
We also have a question on what is the right solution. Right here can be wrong somewhere else. Once again the customer needs to get more information on what is the Customer environment the future business plans, technical capabilities, maturity of users, readiness to deploy to the solution in consideration. While I gave this many parameters, I would say, TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is the major parameter before arriving at the Solution.
You can always give a solution and provide your attractive quote. But what is the end cost incurred by the Customer? Does he need to buy additional licenses? Does he need new hardware? Should he install a new Operating System? Should he hire a new administrator? What are such additional costs and how many of them are fixed costs and how many are recurring? If you as a consultant do not ask these questions, the Customer will be in trouble even if you wash your hands with your service and getting paid the service charges. And don't think you can run away. The project will be deferred or halted if the Customer budget doesn't support the other investment apart from your service charges. And you may not get the deal and you may need to leave in the middle of engagement with partial payment. At the end, you need to understand that you need t meet Customer's goals and objectives. Not just yours and your company's goals. When you go with a thought process of being in customer shoes, you will get another call from the same customer for another deal.
While this is on the outbound side, the serious challenge is from the inbound system. You as a sales or Pre-sales guy can go and confidently make a proposal when you know you have a resource pool of high quality and readiness to join the project in the timelines expected by Customer. Similarly you need to be confident that your operations team will give the needed software and setup to your offshore team to start from Day one. When your guys need to travel to abroad, your immigration and travel desk need to feel the same urgency and support you to meet the promised dates of deployment at Onshore. If any of such operations and support teams fail or feel indifferent to your priorities you will be quite defensive. The organization needs to work in such a way that all units work towards the same business objective and metrics.
This is the structure which ensures the success by all means for any service provider. And it is your organization which should drive for such togetherness and awareness of priorities.
