The Sham of ‘Collective Experience’

Bait and Switch

The Sham of ‘Collective Experience’

Over the years, an outbreak of a deliberate sham seems to have gone rampant in the consulting sector. Consultant profiles indicating years of experience – which is supposed to reflect cumulative knowledge and wisdom gained – are used for ‘bait and switch’ while pursuing client engagement, but the real scenario indicates something else.

A Dubious Turn of Events –

Imagine working with a team of four which has one proficient resource and three gofers riding on the coattails on the sole expert. This is a very common scenario in a typical engagement. When stories are heard about the existence of mere 3-4 key nodes in a resource arrangement of hundred, surprisingly it doesn’t raise any eyebrows within the business concourse.

These circumstances in the relationship between client and service provider can lead to a sordid turn of events, such as:

  • General mistrust in the ecosystem and within the two parties (client and service provider)
  • Buffered engagements that are further compounded by cost, scope, effort overruns
  • Intolerable levels of attrition due to friction in the work flow
  • Unusable Systems that can never be scaled
  • Mediocrity becomes the best-case scenario

Imagine!

An aggregate of resources who have individual and collective relevance, along with the required expertise to get you through the finish-line. Imagine if the team composition looked like this:

  • Relationship Manager – Industry Thought-Leader
  • Project / Engagement Manager – Ex-Agency Project Manager
  • Business Analysts – Finance, Operations Managers & Executives, Developers of the Solution being deployed
  • Developers and Architects – Solution Engineers with Domain knowledge

The client is provided with a team of adept resources where each individual has potential scalability to ensure cost effectiveness and minimization of effort overruns.

At ZAG, we have found that a team formation such as devised above works wonders while deploying cloud ERP solutions for agencies we work with. We bring in the blue-sky thinking, and create out of the box services and solutions to achieve an end result which is mutually beneficial for both the parties.

What do you think? Have you ever come across ‘Collective Experience’ experiences?

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