English
How big consultancy companies create opportunities for us.
It happens quite often that new opportunity and challenge for some is missed opportunity, a pile of problems and a loss of a customer for others. In world of IT projects, it is day-to-day reality that one vendor is replaced by another, because it is unable to deliver the solution on time and in expected quality. What however amazes me all the time is that how many opportunities it offers to us, a small BI vendor.
It is probably just a coincidence that we have participated on several projects being delivered by multinational system integrator. This company is huge it has thousands of employees worldwide. Total experience of its employees must be in thousands of years and they have experts in nearly any technology or field of IT. Nevertheless, they are not able to deliver even simple standard BI project. It might be partly because of their size, they cannot focus on every client and its needs. In any case they do the delivery with team of juniors or people with unsuitable background and experiences than needed. And surprisingly they do that in multiple countries for different customers so it must be caused by their corporate culture or some similar source. Such an approach gives us big advantage even thou we cannot offer deep knowledge of all of IT technology or programme management consulting. What we can however deliver very well is a small task force team which is capable to understand the business need and in close internal and external cooperation deliver what was promised.
Such task force team cannot be built as a pyramid with under-skilled people at the bottom of it and one senior at the top, but as a team of equals with similar amount of experience who must trust each other. This setup allows also better building of trust and engagement with the customer. Those teams are superb for focused, high priority and very risky tasks which should not be very labour-intensive (in thousands of person days).
Using small task force team, we delivered all requirements in time and quality requested by our customers for much lower price in situations where big system integrators failed miserably. We have proven our approach works and that you cannot replace knowledge and experience by only sheer numbers.
Marek Matějka
DWH/BI Consultant
[email protected]