The other day something happened that brought back a lot of memories. I have been an enterprise systems consultant for many years and in that time have been involved in a lot of interviews – both as a subject and an interviewer. One of the most difficult interview types is the “team interview” where a client team interviews the consultant team. With the economy pressing tough choices on everyone – team interviews on conference calls are a necessary evil – but after my latest experience I realized there is a whole generation of people who have never had to do it.
Let me give you a hypothetical situation: The prospective client is an ISV. Their CEO is well respected and has strong backing to continue marketing their licensed suite of products. The CEO’s knowledge of the market though tells him he should explore if there are other ways to deliver his product and is interested in Software as a Service. He has limited resources and although they are very competent, he knows that researching a SaaS product would take them off their core market. To accomplish his goal of exploring SaaS, he is considering using a consultant team. He finds a group that seems to be a reasonable candidate and after a one-to-one call with the company’s CEO, decides to bring in his core team to have a phone conference with the consultant group’s core team. His aim is to discuss a service offering the consultant group has for assessing the problems and advantages in SaaS for ISVs.
The consultant group in question has four years of experience in the SaaS market and outsourced product development (OPD). They are a specialized shop providing business and technical consulting in SaaS product development and software development with a total head count of less than fifty. Both as a team and individually, the group has a wide range of experience solving software development problems.
The call begins well enough. Everyone introduces themselves and the meeting is turned over to the core team of the ISV. But, what transpired from there seemed to be an unplanned series of questions with the general aim of disqualifying the consultant group rather than finding out what they had to offer. Imagine a few questions and answers:
What is company’s experience with HIPAA? With NAS? With security and reliability? How many people do you have on staff? How many companies have you helped? What kinds of software development do you do?
These are all fair questions of course. But in this context, the unplanned nature of the call failed to serve both the ISV and the consultant group. No one really explored what the client needed or what the consultant group was offering in this exchange. Instead, many of the questions that were asked either weren’t relevant without knowing more about the client’s need or not related to the competency needed for the consultant group to effectively complete the short engagement proposed.
OK. With that background, how could the call have gone better for everyone? What should teams expect or do to make this type of call a valuable exchange?
First and foremost – the call should have been facilitated. Someone, on either team, needs to take the role of facilitator to ensure the meeting has a goal and it is accomplished in the time available to the satisfaction of everyone. Yes, that sounds a bit formal, but assuming the call and time of everyone involved has value, facilitation should be considered a point of respect on all sides to ensure value is received.
With a facilitator in place, the next step is to go around both groups briefly, giving names, positions, and roles. If there are more than ten people on the call, it might be well to have team leaders introduce their groups and give a summary of their backgrounds to keep the time involved in the “round-robin” down.
Next, most facilitators will ask for permission of the group to lead the call – and ensure it accomplishes what is needed. This is an important step because it sets the tone that this is a meeting and it has a goal. With an assent, the facilitator may then lay a couple of ground rules to ensure people are heard and their concerns are answered.
A lot could be said about the importance of the facilitation in meetings in general and how it can be best accomplished. But, to keep to our topic – consider these points as a bare bones standard:
- Introduce everyone with name, position and role
- Facilitator usually takes the last introduction, explains the role briefly in the context of the call, and asks for everyone’s permission to assume the role.
- An end time for the call is agreed to with an understanding of what will be done if the time is exceeded.
- Ground rules are quickly covered. It always sounds a bit awkward at first, but an understanding of respect for each other and the time is always key. Even though in this case there would be no formal presentation, a online workspace with a “whiteboard” is a “best practice” because it allows the facilitator to put goals, notes, times, and follow ups out where everyone can see them.
- Goals for the meeting are agreed to. If they exist before the call – well and good – but often they do not. Even if they do, getting the goals in front of everyone is critical for success and when the question is asked, there are often ideas exposed that no one had considered.
- Agenda is agreed to with times. Setting times is critical. In this kind of meeting, limited time should be set aside for the consultant team to answer all the general questions that are usually asked and the client team should have a short period to set a context for their questions in terms of the project under consideration.
- Changes will happen. As the meeting evolves and time runs down, the facilitator should check that everyone is still on board and their concerns are being answered. Having a meeting interface can allow participants speaking from many locations to signal they want to be recognized, they want to add to their team’s presentation or they have to leave.
- At the end of the meeting, a summary of any action items or followups is agreed to and the call ends.
One more point – if you are interviewing a consultant team – keep your questions open and ask them in a way that gives some insight into the group’s process and approach. As consultants we sometimes call this “asking for free consulting,” but it is the best way for both teams to assess if there is a match. Instead of, “What is your experience with HIPAA?” – the question should be something like, “How would you approach a situation that required HIPAA compliance?” In this case, the first part of the answer should be “Don’t take unnecessary risks. Have you really evaluated if you need to identify a person with the data? Like credit card data, is that something better left to those that are tuned to dealing with those risks?” Instead of asking, “What is your experience with NAS?” – the question should be, “How would you approach a situation requiring NAS or high volume storage?” and the answer should start with a short series of questions about where the data is going to be stored (in house or in the cloud), record size, processing needs and where the finished product of the data needs to go.
Of course, a skilled facilitator will re-ask a question that isn’t open enough to get the answer the client needs because in meetings, it is key that a facilitator remain neutral – but that takes understanding by everyone before it can work well. Should the client team or the consultant team take on the role? That really depends on the experience of the team, but most of the time the consultant team should be more experienced with facilitating. Either way – if making a decision is important, be sure you are asking the right questions and getting answers that mean something related to the assignment.
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