Scarcity of qualified consultants
As digital transformation trends accelerate and regulatory changes come every day to their inevitable deadlines, the demand for experienced and technically-skilled Aptitude consultants is growing. And so is the complexity of the projects. The more complex, the more people needed on board. When our demand for consultants is increasing, we might even face a situation when we will have to look elsewhere for more resources. So, either we reach out to the market and try to head-hunt freelancers or we reach out to specialized Aptitude agencies or partners, who can give us the resources we need.
Thinking ahead of implementation process
Most organizations know that the initial implementation is just a starting process. After the typical project work is done, some other work appears on the horizon – further customization or support services. Therefore, having people onboard from the beginning and then transitioning them over to support and customization roles sounds like a good knowledge transfer option and maintains your peace of mind with further system development.
Money, money, money
Let’s be honest – every project’s budget is under pressure. And we always face some requests for budget-optimization or to avoid project budget overspend. Hiring consultants from the market is less expensive when it comes to direct comparison between rates – which is obvious for some of the reasons stated below.
Introducing mixed implementation model – things to take care of.
Developing your team into a mixed implementation model can bring you security in business continuity, empower your future system optimization plans or simply save some budget. But it must be done the right way. Below you can find a useful list, which you can quickly apply into your current or upcoming implementation process.
1. Quality of people and the work they can provide.
Hiring a consulting team is an engagement where quality of work and experience of a consultant matter most. And the differences are not so obvious at first glance. Working on a similar number of projects is not necessarily equal in complexity and challenges faced. An enterprise implementation, with various subsidiaries is quite different than a quick, out-of-the-box implementation for a local company. And there are real life examples, that, sometimes, less can be more here –where having 2 experienced consultants can solve our challenges better than a wider, less skilled team.
Hint: check a consultant’s experience by not only interviewing, but also confronting them with real life challenges. References are also something to be checked extensively prior to contracting a person.
2. Amount of expertise we can benefit from.
When working with freelance contractors, you as a customer, are responsible for sourcing and interviewing the candidate. “We pay for what we see” in this case. Therefore, we cannot count much on broadening of the support we can expect, if/when the problem outgrows its original scope. On the other hand, working with a specialized company, which possess a larger pool of talented consultants can increase the chances of collective problem solving within a larger pool of consultants, which saves time and money.
Hint: try to investigate how broad and wide an expertise can be provided to your implementation when making commitment to a specialized partner vs. freelancer?
3. Flexibility in growing/shrinking the consulting team.
In recent times, the ability to assess situations quickly, and make decision in real time has become more and more important. There seems to be no faltering in the stream of business events that a company must react to, and as such, we search for more flexibility in making faster decisions – sometimes instantly. The same rule applies to scaling up or scaling down your Aptitude Software implementation team. How flexible are you on this one? Do you need to employ people permanently from the beginning or can you act in a vendor relationship? How quickly can you increase the number of people on board – can you establish some specific framework here? And finally – how quickly and costly can you scale down – just bearing in mind the recent turbulent times we have been through, and how it has affected our working relationships.
Hint: check your partner’s history in scaling up/down teams – how quickly, how many headcounts in a particular amount of time, but also on how complex the project was.
4. Is business continuity properly secured?
Have you asked yourself this question – what will happen if my lead consultant finds a better paid job? Or what will happen if she/he gets severely sick for several weeks during system launch phase? How quickly can I count on the replacement? Is there some guarantee in terms of any SLA that will protect us? When working with freelancers we are responsible to mitigate the risk. If it is vendor led –we have more options to put that into the contract.
Hint: evaluate your current replacement options for leading consultants on your project – how quickly can you potentially recover if they are gone? Ask for a tangible back up plan for your implementation.
5. What will be the ramp up time?
A proper onboarding process will introduce new consultants to our project. But like for every new team building process, before that team performs some other phases need to happen i.e., forming, storming and norming (Tuckman, Bruce W. (1965) ‘Developmental sequence in small groups’, Psychological Bulletin, 63, 384-399). These usually involve their own teething issues, conflicts and other power struggles, too. If this sounds like a situation we would like to avoid, then hiring a whole team, which has gone through that already, is a better option.
Hint: if possible, look for established, combat proven teams, who already have established rules of cooperation and went through conflict and authority crises.
Where do I begin?
Implementing Aptitude Software in a mixed implementation model gets more and more common. Some specialized Aptitude partners are ready to give us access to proven and battle tested teams, professional customer service and thorough product knowledge, which will support our project goals. The easiest way is usually to ask for an inquiry or even have a free consulting session. Hopefully, the information provided in this article will help you choose the optimal partner for your Aptitude Software implementation.
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