I attended an interesting session the other day entitled
“What I Didn’t Learn From School”. One small part of the presentation was about
collaboration, specifically amongst people in the same field (in this case web
design).
The gist of this was to not look upon other designers as
rivals, but rather as potential collaborators. After all it is not always
possible to do it all yourself, and if you want to succeed and expand, then you
need to be able to take on more work than you can always do with your own 2
hands.
Now I agree with this concept whole-heartedly, and one of
the caveats was to be sure you were familiar with your collaborators (how good
they were at what they do etc.). But I want to expand on that in so far as you
need to establish with your collaborators what you expect from them as far as
business professionalism is concerned, especially if you are going to put them
in front of your clients.
A Story: When I moved from mainstream employment to working
for a full-time consulting company, I had the good fortune to be well mentored,
and the opportunity to learn a phenomenal amount about working in the field.
We were implementing a huge upgrade to the custom ERP system
our client was running. In this implementation we were integrating some 3rd
party IBM solutions along with our own custom work, and in conjunction with the needs of our client we had
sourced an IBM specialist (retired) who was doing education on IBM products.
My boss, and our sales manager met with the consultant and
reviewed the project with him, then arranged a meeting with myself and the
client I.T. Manager.
From that we contracted an initial education session for the
clients sales group, which went very well. However after that session, I (as
the project manager) was asked to have meeting with my boss, the client I.T.
manager, and the consultant.
Picture this scenario-small conference room, my boss and I
on one side of the table, the I.T. manager and the consultant on the other.
After some initial positive feedback for the I.T. manager the consultant took
over the session. Essentially he proceeded to call into question some of the
things we were doing within the project (based upon 1 meeting with the client),
and to semi proposed that there were more IBM specific solutions that he could
implement instead.
Although I didn’t let my annoyance show, you can guess I was
not pleased. I listened to everything he had to say, and when he was finished,
my boss (who does not love confrontation, and always tries to appease a
client), turned to me and said that the project was designed by me, and
approved by the client, and that he would hold his thoughts till I had an
opportunity to respond (Wow some times I loved that man).
I merely proceeded by asking questions (that I knew the
answers to) that related to the actual requirements of the client. I asked how
the IBM solutions in question could be tailored to meet those requirements
(knowing they couldn’t and why they couldn’t), and referring to the I.T manager
to correct me if I erred in describing any of the requirements.
At the end of the meeting the consultant agreed that his
ideas were not suitable in this instance.
You would have thought a supposed expert with so many years
of experience would no better than to address this in front of the client
rather than with me or my boss, that is unless you consider that he was
probably more of a rival than a collaborator.
He did one more education session on the contract for our
client, and never worked for us again. The project completed on time, on
budget, and everyone else was happy ;)
