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Continuing the Vendor Selection topic, we now turn our attention to the project team.
Experience and the Personalities of the proposed team are almost of equal importance. The team has to have the requisite professional knowledge and skills, this is obvious, but at the same time successful project teams are created when this professional knowledge is coupled with complimentary personalities.
One of the key areas here is that vendors shouldn’t be proposing just the next person in line on the bench they should be building the right team for each client. Talk to your vendors, understand their staffing methodology, understanding how they went about assembling the proposed team. Unfortunately anyone can go to a recruiting website and find “available” consultants, but do these folks have the full package required to be successful? Can you assemble a viable team in this manner?
More often than not, the answer is NO in these respects. So in working with your vendor, we’ve identified some areas that have made us successful in building the right teams for our clients.
When evaluating the technical skills of the team, everyone needs to be cognizant that each client has different needs and requirements. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Is our team more functional or more technical?
- Are we going to send our team to training or expect the consulting vendor to facilitate this?
- How does our organization accept change?
- Do we have the requisite experience to lead an upgrade or implementation or do we need the vendor to facilitate this?
- Is there a functional area we are underutilizing or don’t have the requisite SME to support it?
Finally, make sure to speak with the proposed project team. Get to know them and try and make an assessment of how the fit into your organization.
- Do they have similar personalities?
- Can they communicate tough messages?
- Can they obtain buy in from less flexible client staff?
The answer to these questions will help you better understand the technical scope of what you may be relying on your consulting vendor for. Getting the right team enables vendors to build trust within the teams, work more effectively and enables clients to have a smoother, more successful project.
Stay Tuned…. More to come!
TAGS: Costs, RFI, RFP, Vendor Selection
