1. Primarily driven by dashboard creation that integrates with MOSS
2. Provides for mobile dashboards accessible from iPhone\iPad, Droid and Windows Mobile
3. Pre-built MS SSAS cubes for Dynamics AX
4. I didn’t care if it provided ETL creation or cube creation capabilities as I’m pretty comfortable inside BIDS and with SSIS and SSAS.

I did a Google search (sorry, Bing search) using terms meaningful to me and filtered down the first 5 pages of returns to get a list of potential companies.  I know almost all of them already, but hadn’t spent much time on their websites before.  So, that was my first stop.  All I wanted to know was what products they had, a quick synopsis on what each does, if they integrated to AX and MOSS, did they have a mobile solutions and what the basic pricing was like.

Instead, I had to weed through pages that talked about business value, solutions, the importance of analytics, their management team, their mission, the customer lists, synergy, recorded demos, dense graphics, customer testimonials, news listings etc.  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

In essence, I wanted to know 5 simple things and had about 10 minutes total to learn them.  Instead, I wasted all 10 minutes just trying to figure out how to find what I needed.  In essence, their sites weren’t letting me buy – they were forcing me to be sold. 

Go take a look at your company’s website – what do you see?

From the article: “That’s the key economic argument for the distinction: if you treat an artist like a vendor, you’ll often get mediocre results in return. On the other hand, if you treat a vendor like an artist, you’ll waste time and money.”

And: “A key element of the distinction is that in addition to the varying output potential, vendors are easier to replace than talent is.”

Personally, I hate when I’m trying to apply “Talent” ie. a novel solution, a cheaper solution, etc. and get treated like a “Vendor”. Some of my favorites are “We’ll just white that out when they print on the P.O.’s” or “We’ll just track that in Excel.”

Understanding which clients want talent and which ones just want a vendor is an important part of the relationship. Of course, then there there are companies that want to get talent but only pay for a vendor.

In my current job, the guys that report to me are really, really good in the sales cycle and pretty good operators so I spend a significant amount of time on talent recruiting, performance metrics and internal projects to improve productivity, efficiency and quality.  In fact, I think its fair to say that I’ve spent the majority of my time in the last 2 years in this area.  And, as a result, I’ve discovered something pretty important……none of it matters.

Don’t get me wrong – process and and a continual drive to improve are one of the hallmarks of excellence for a consulting team.  But, despite that, three things are far more important:

Leads, sits and sales.

Let’s face it, folks:  if you don’t sell, you don’t have anything to which your excellent processes can be applied.  And, you can’t sell if you don’t get sits with a prospect.  Of course, you don’t get sits if you don’t get leads that generate that sit.  Ergo sequitur, the most important thing to a consultancy is leads, sits and sales.

So, if you have leads, sits and sales, keep on your approach.  If not, drop everything and get deals closed.  Pretty easy, no?

Let me make it clear that I don’t hate lawyers or contracts.  A friend of mine, an ex-judge on the Texas State Circuit Court and now a SWAT team litigator for a prestigious Dallas law firm, once took me to task for belittling the contract process and the attorneys involved in it.  His insights, to this day, shape my attitudes and outlook on this process.

I believe contracts serve two purposes.  First, they confirm the terms under which two parties want to form a close and often deeply intimate relationship.  By being clear in these terms, they eliminate doubt, set expectations and clear the air in advance of work being done. This frees the creative juices of the parties to do the actual work they both believe will lead them to greater degrees of success.  Second, they memorialize that understanding so the benefit of the agreement accrues to future or successive participants despite the absence of the originators.  Again, this frees the new players from uncertainty and debate and allows them to more freely go about their business.  Lawyers, to the extent they help the parties gain clarity, align in agreement and make clear their positions are doing some of the most important and admirable work in capitalist society.  Not quite as important as those individuals who take significant personal and capital risk to build new companies, fund new ideas and create new jobs, but right up there.

When I negotiate with clients over these valuable little jewels of understanding, I run into three basic types of attorneys:

1. The Business Guy:  This is the attorney who is closely aligned with the commercial concerns of the business, understands those commercial concerns, and seeks diligently to reflect those concerns in the legal context and language of the contract.  These guys are really easy to work because they only focus on clear understanding and alignment with the commercial concerns.  I treat them like a trusted partner, am completely open and transparent in my dealings with them, and generally get deals done very quickly with them.
2. The Rewrite Guy:  This is the attorney that rewrites every aspect of your documents because they are not the way he would have written them.  Their mindset and perspective may be protectionist of the commercial side of the transaction, but they end up changing everything.  With these folks, if they are genuinely trying to act like “the business guy” you’ll just have to work through it.  If they are acting like the next category (see below), you may have a challenge.  I generally just bluntly talk to them about the issue, to wit: “These agreements may not be perfect, but they’re pretty good.  Can we just focus on the commercial issue most important to you?”
3. The Persecutor:  This is the attorney who attacks you on everything, never gives an inch, and belittles every attempt to compromise.  You have only three choices with this guy.  If you need the deal, hard negotiate.  It will take a ton of time and you have to be very patient.  If you don’t need the deal, walk away and advise the prospect that their attorney is not being reasonable.  Lastly, the approach I normally take, is to engage our executive sponsor, explain the situation and ask them to participate in the discussions in attempt to mediate.  If they will, expect to spend a lot of time on the phone – sometimes days or months (one deal in Chicago took 6 months just on legal).  If they won’t, I walk.

In closing, a big thank you to James Stanton (my buddy from Dallas) for his influence on my thoughts and to Betsy Tucker and Gregg Lallier who are two attorneys I recently had the pleasure to work with on deals and who were great partners in making the deals better for everyone.

Its because we haven’t, as a group or industry, created an engine to deliver to us our next new hire.    Law has law schools.  Doctors have med school.  CPA’s have university accounting programs.  We have…well, nothing really.  We sometimes take people out of our customers.  We outsource some overseas.  We sometimes hire someone that took the exams on their own.  But, overall, we just hire senior people from other companies or watch larger companies absorb smaller ones and reduce the number of companies in our space.  And, as a result, we are left with the following:

1. Continued downward rate pressure from clients
2. Continued upward salary costs from potential staff
3. Sub par skill sets on available candidates as compared to their salary requirements (Over $100K for a GP Consultant with 10yrs experience who only knows Financials and Distribution and doesn’t hold any certs?  The same price tag for an AX financials consultant with 3 years experience?  Really?  Pass.)

Why are we in this situation?  Here are my thoughts:

1. By and large, the majority of equity owners in this industry focus on results for today, not two years down the road.  They either want to close a  major deal then immediately hire the most senior staff they can find to work it OR grow EBITDA to hit a liquidation event.  In either case, they are not investing in their future labor pool.
2. Most services managers and equity owners think the investment in anything other than a traditional senior hire is too expensive.
3. We expect Microsoft to solve the problem for us at no additional cost to us.  As evidence of this, harken back to the old GP Bootcamp days – that was cheap but it failed to lack of interest.

So, what’s the solution?  There is more than one.  My particular favorite is recruiting and training college hires.  At my current employer, at the end of June of this year, we will have officially trained 15 shiny new college hires in the last 3 years.  We take them onboard in June, do 90 days in the classroom, then put the onsite for 9 months under strict senior supervision.  The first 6 mos of their total tenure is usually non-billable, but we get tons of valuable work out of them in terms of internal development (like keeping work papers up to date) or project work (meeting scribe, task do-er, etc).  The last 6 months, we expect the revenue numbers to go up dramatically.  In the 3 years we’ve done this, we have ALWAYS more than made back our investment in the first year. And, perhaps more telling, we have NEVER had a client give us anything but glowing reviews on our recruits.

I have other techniques, including remote services, near-shore consulting operations and career changer targeted hiring. I’ll probably write about them later, but the college hire initiative is by far the most fun and successful.

To get more information about how to start, try the following:

1. Students to Business:  http://www.microsoft.com/studentstobusiness/home/default.aspx
2. Partnersource:  They’ve added great content around staff development.
3. Microsoft Dynamics Academic Alliance:  http://www.microsoft.com/education/highered/faculty/curriculum/dynamicsaa/default.aspx

But what if we aren’t?  What if the systems are just so complex that these trigger mechanisms aren’t anomalous but are inherent to the systems. What if any complex system will fail, time and time again, and you just can’t prevent it? 

Keep that thought in mind.  Now think about the largest ERP, CRM or infrastructure project you are running.  Are these less complex?  You have 10’s and in some cases 100’s of people, working on individual tasks, all of which are interconnected in inputs, outputs and completion dates.  Not all of them report to you.  Not all of them are doing this full time.  Not all of them share your same motivation or primary interest.  Not all of them really care.  And not a one of them will take the blame if the project goes bad – that particular little nugget of concern is held by only three people – the sponsor (who will blame the next two guys), the P&L owner from the consulting operation (me) and the project manager (many of you).

It’s really more surprising when these projects succeed then when they fail.

Do we give up?  No, of course not.  I am paid the medium sized buck to manage exactly this kind of risk.  But I am beginning to rethink how I manage it.  Specifically, I am trying to be less hierarchal and less rigid in the command and control process under the theory that decentralized process and decision making is less brittle and, therefore, more likely to deal with the inevitable failures more quickly and more flexibly.  By doing so, the problems are dealt with while still small as opposed to letting a string of connected issues develop into a huge mess.

Here are my thoughts:

1.  Reduce command and control:  Rather than having a highly structured organization with a single CandC PM, I’m thinking about much smaller working teams with defined deadlines and little task management.  Let them figure it out provided its documented and delivered, on budget and on time.

2.  Know that you will fail:  Don’t plan on perfection, plan on failure.  You will miss deadlines, and you will miss requirements.  Admit to it, acknowledge it early, make certain everyone knows about it, then adjust to it rapidly.  Put another way, don’t fight the failure – work within it.  Or, stop the Tae Kwan Do and move to Aikido.

3.  Don’t get all hyped over SureStep, PMI, SDLC, etc:  Use very simple pieces of it, make certain it works for the business, but don’t get religious over it.  It’s a roadmap of the interstate highway, not a treasure map to the fountain of youth.  Stop working the methodology and work the business problem.

4.  Hire thinkers, not skill sets: I’ve been promoting college hires for years now and have experienced tremendous success in making such hires.  That’s because we hire thinkers and teach them skills rather than hiring skills and try to get them to think.  Skills need command and control, written policies, methodologies.  Thinkers take care of customers.

Again, these are my thoughts and, in the spirit of TheDofR, I’d love to hear you thoughts as well.

Next year, as a group, let’s all try to knock Doug Burgum off the list entirely.  Isn’t he retired and playing golf with Elvis these days?

10.  Drink shots.  Anywhere.  But most especially in the Omni Hotel lobby before noon while the CEO of your company walks by.

9.  Go to the Randy and Andy party and, while drunk, button-hole Kirill with your opinions on the current state of the partner channel and Microsoft’s stock price.

8.  Go to the Randy and Andy Party and stay later than midnight. 

7.  Wear a pink sash lettered with the words “Bachelorette Party” and ask Howie Mandell if he has a hidden piercing.   (This was me.  There is way more to this story, and it involves a very important client team member getting married, an IBIS project manager than knows how to convince me to do about anything, and a rare collision with a B-List celebrity).

6.  Make fun of Malcom Gladwell’s haircut near an open mike.  At the Keynote.  While the mike was on.

5.  Go to Metro Diner, drink too much, then decide you can dance like Usher or drop it and grind like a 17 year old club kid.  Especially when you are a middle-aged, 6’3”, overweight IT professional.  

4.  Go to Metro Diner and dance, period. 

3.  Go to Metro Diner and sit at the bar, making out.   For hours. 

2.  Get your hotel room at the W for the week of Convergence only to check in the night of the Lil Wayne concert at the Phillips.   Then expect to get any sleep while the concert goers party with the hotel security staff in the room next door.

1.  Wake up at noon, miss most of the sessions then complain there is no GP content.  There was plenty.  For that matter, wake up at noon, miss most sessions, then complain there was no NAV, CRM or AX content.  It was all there and it was all great.

Good stuff, Convergence Team.  Looking forward to seeing you in Houston!

This is Brian Hastings, the IBIS Services Account Manager from MS that manages our account. He’s an awesome guy and a critical partner in our success at IBIS.