This installation of the Agile with External Clients series shows the relationship between how an engagement is sold and how that affects a group’s attempt to execute the project using an Agile approach. Let’s start with a maxim for every member of a professional services group or consulting practice to burn into their mind:
The Sold Destiny Principle
The way something is packaged and sold frames the expectations of the customer.
One of my first questions when engaging with a new client is “How is your product/service sold?” This is an important question because of The Sold Destiny Principle. If services are being sold in a way that does not dovetail seamlessly into how those services are delivered, the team builds friction into the way their work is done, heaping frustration upon all parties involved, including the customers.
Many professional services and consulting engagements are sold through a fixed-bid approach. A prospective client drafts a Request for Proposal (RFP) which includes a writeup of what they (think they) want, and firms then take the RFP and respond with a proposal document. Unless a group’s focus is competing on a commodity level, this is a horrible approach. This drives the value proposition straight to price with marginal consideration for skill and quality of the solution delivered. A consulting group can look at an RFP, frame what they believe it would take to deliver a quality result, and the conversation stops there. The customer is then left to decide from a collection of proposals whose differences amount to who is cheapest, which proposal is the most aesthetically appealing, and which groups the customer has worked with in the past. (There is a fourth differentiator, which is how much schmoozing the salesperson has done. This is a horrible and costly way to compete, and generally conveys a lack of confidence in one’s product. But, I digress. Let’s save that for another post.)
The tragedy here is that it appears to the customer that every option carries all the uncertainty and false precision of phased approaches to software development. This is not the case. The salesperson whose delivery team uses an Agile, iterative approach has a keen competitive advantage. If you want to run your projects in an Agile manner, equip your salespeople to press this advantage.
The Agile practice that has not reached out to their salespeople must shoulder most of the blame for the friction between sales and delivery. After all, the salesperson is going on what they have known for their whole career and the approach to which the industry at large defaults. The cross-functional focus of Agile in general and Scrum in particular exists for a reason. Cross-functional participation in the Agile process enables a company to embrace The Rule of Concept to Customer, which most certainly includes your salespeople.
Due to the rigid, transactional nature of a fixed bid process, the contents of an RFP give a false impression. It’s a concrete description based upon a collective conscious from a group that has never seen the very thing they are attempting to describe. The requirements all appear to be must-haves, and are based upon having seen nothing. The truth is that it is a collection of must-haves and might-wants, liberally dressed with a not-so-sure vinaigrette.
An Agile engagement allows the salesperson to say something like this:
“Look, I know this RFP probably has things you know you need, plus some things you aren’t so sure about. Instead of you guys locking yourself into this 6-month heap of work, what if we broke it down into smaller blocks of investment, say 2 months in size? We’ll break these requirements down into the must-haves and might-wants, and get started on the must-haves.”
“Every 2 weeks we’ll show you the working software we have developed so far, and then we can talk about what you want to put into the next 2 weeks. You can switch up the priority on the items, and if you want to push some of them out and pull an equal amount work forward from the lower-priority work, that is not a probelm. It’s your 2-month block to spend as you want in 2-week increments.”
“As we close in on the 2-month mark, we’ll take a look at this together and see if you want to invest in the next 2-month block. If you don’t that is OK. You take the working software you have so far and run with it. If you want to continue, we’re more than happy to keep delivering new working functionality in 2-week slices for another 2 months. We’ll repeat that evaluation and decision process for the third block, and by the end you have a product that you have been able to shape as we go based upon seeing the working solution evolve and deciding what you want to put into it.”
I have seen that approach work very well, and it generates a loyalty among customers and a reputation for being a breed apart among consulting companies. Looking for the best way to run consulting engagements with Agile? Sell them with Agile.