When I’m engaged as an agile consultant, I often find myself pondering a fundamental question: does the client dictate what they need, or is it my role to guide them towards the right solutions? My experience has led me to believe that it’s the latter, but the reality is often more nuanced.
Understanding Client Needs
Clients frequently arrive with a specific agenda. They might have a clear idea of what they want, but as a consultant, my job is to dig deeper. It’s essential to uncover what they truly need to succeed in their endeavours. This often involves:
- Assessing the Situation: What are the underlying issues? Is the project they’re pursuing genuinely the right one?
- Delivering Value: My focus is on providing maximum value, even if it means steering them away from their initial requests.
The duration of my engagement can significantly influence how this process unfolds. Most of my work tends to be short-term, spanning two to three weeks. During these periods, clients typically seek advice on how to implement agile practices effectively. I provide insights and strategies, which they then take forward independently.
However, I’ve also had the opportunity to engage in longer-term projects, particularly with professional services teams. In these cases, I work closely with various teams within the organisation, often collaborating with their Scrum Masters to observe and provide feedback.
The Agile Misconception
A common misconception I encounter is the desire to simply “get better at agile.” While this is a popular trend, it doesn’t always translate into tangible benefits for the organisation or its customers. The real question is: what value does this improvement bring?
In one recent engagement with a professional services company, I encountered what I call the “death spiral of consulting.” This phenomenon occurs when a company grows too quickly, driven by aggressive sales tactics. Here’s how it typically unfolds:
- Aggressive Sales: The company builds a strong reputation and begins to attract more clients.
- Hiring Frenzy: To meet demand, they hire rapidly, often compromising on candidate quality.
- Overcommitment: With more projects than available talent, the quality of work begins to suffer.
- Reinforcing the Cycle: The need for more gigs leads to even more aggressive sales tactics, perpetuating the cycle.
Finding the Right Balance
What’s crucial for any business, not just professional services, is understanding the balance between quality and quantity. Here are some key considerations:
- Quality Control: What level of quality do you want to maintain? This should dictate how much work you take on.
- Sustainable Growth: Aim for gradual growth that allows you to maintain quality. This means hiring the right people and selecting the right projects.
- Selective Engagement: Not every opportunity is worth pursuing. It’s vital to choose engagements that align with your business values and capabilities.
The Real Challenge
Most clients don’t truly know what they want. They may think they need agile or DevOps implementations, but the real challenge often lies elsewhere. My role is to help them identify these core difficulties, even if it means approaching the solution from an unexpected angle.
Ultimately, the goal is to ensure they derive genuine value from our collaboration. It’s about guiding them towards the right path, even if it requires a bit of finesse.
If you found this discussion insightful, I encourage you to engage with me further. Whether you have questions about agile, Scrum, or DevOps, or simply want to chat, feel free to book a coffee with me through Naked Agility. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome!
So the question was, does a client tell an agile consultant what they need, or does it work the other way around? I think it works the other way around, but I think it’s more complicated than that because a lot of clients come with an agenda. So quite often, you come in under a particular agenda, but the mark of a great consultant is you are trying to deliver the maximum value to the customer, right?
So you have to figure out, regardless of what they’ve asked for, what is it that they need for them to be successful in whatever it is that they’re trying to do? Or even, is the thing they’re trying to do the right thing that they’re trying to do? And then slowly convince them to do the right thing. So I guess it depends how long you’re going to be engaged with the customer for what that really looks like.
I’m quite often engaged with customers for a short period of time. Most of my engagements with customers have either been over two or three weeks. That’s generally when they want advice. They’re like, “We want to understand how we do something,” and I’m coming in, giving them advice, and then they’re taking it forward. I’m not working with them to do it, but I’ve also done longer engagements, usually for professional services teams, where I’m working with lots of different teams inside of their organisation.
So it’s like I’m internally consulting with lots of different teams, and I would come in and help observe, give them some feedback, usually working with their scrum master. So when they come, they want a particular thing, right? They want to, usually actually, they want to get better at this agile thing. But that’s not necessarily like getting being awesome at agile. What value does that provide the company? What value does that provide their customers? It’s not necessarily the right thing, but that’s what they ask for because that’s the trend, right?
So you quite often come in under that guise, but then you’ve got to figure out what is it that this organisation actually needs. Is it a leadership issue where you need to focus on that whole engagement pipeline that they’re working through? I did an engagement recently with a professional services company, and they had built up this great business.
I have a weird name for it; I call it the death spiral of consulting. It’s where you get a little bit too big, and you need to feed the monster, which is your business. So you have very aggressive sales tactics. You’ve built a great name in the industry, you’re very aggressive with sales tactics, you bring in more, you have to hire more people to get the gigs done because you’ve got these aggressive sales tactics that bring in lots of gigs.
Then you need to do them now, and you get more gigs than people, so you have to hire more people. Because you have to hire them quickly, because you’ve told the customer you can do it, you’re not waiting for the top-tier candidates; you’re getting the people that are available. Then they’re doing the gig, and then you need more gigs because you’ve now got a bigger headcount and more people, so you have more aggressive sales tactics, getting in more gigs.
Then, oh, all our people are busy; we need to hire more people. Even those level of people are not available at the next level down, and you end up in this death spiral of taking on too much work when what they really need is a whip limit, right? They need to control their sales pipeline. It’s not a free-for-all; it’s what can your business safely handle to deliver the level of quality that your customers are looking for.
I think this is true not just for professional services; this is true in any business. What is the level of quality and brand and visual that you’re trying to get from your customers? And what’s the maximum amount of business you can do while safely maintaining that? Then you want to grow slowly while maintaining that level of quality, so you’re hiring the right people, you’re engaging on the right engagements, right? You’re not taking any engagement that comes along because probably any engagement sucks. You’re picking and choosing which engagement at that level.
I think most customers don’t know what they want. They think they want this agile thing or this DevOps thing, and can you come and install it for us? But you have to figure out what it is that is the actual difficulty, the thing that they need help with, and help them with that, even if it’s kind of surreptitiously or kind of around a different way so that they feel like and really do get value from what you’re doing.
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