Petra Heine-Brach
Maybe you have experienced this – we do all the time with our clients: External consultants draw up great complex contracts. In reality, however, service providers fulfill them only partly. Frustration grows on both sides – and this is when our clients call the Process Squad. 📞🚐
🌩️ So, we arrive as the “bad cops” and create contract trackers, gather data about the service performance, compare the promised and the actual performance, make gap lists, prepare penalty claims and invoice reductions, etc…
😤 The affected service providers are usually (and understandably) not amused to deal with us and take our technical criticism sometimes very personally (and also, not very rarely, they ask our clients to fire us). 💵 Sometimes, service providers even offer to pay our clients if we leave. In that case, our effort at least paid off for our clients financially, even though they still do not receive the service they actually wanted.
📈 Don’t get us wrong: We love our clients and our work with them. But we love it even more to not get those jobs. Instead, we prefer to work with our partners (clients and service providers) in far more constructive ways.
🧑🤝🧑 This is why we want to share our experience with you and, therefore, welcome you to our brand-new series about what constitutes a good partnership in IT services. In order to make your mouths water already, here are the titles for the upcoming articles in this series:
1. Are you as a client ready and prepared for a certain service and for controlling it?
2. Watch out when choosing a partner! (In our mind, there are no good or bad service providers – only suitable and unsuitable ones, when it comes to a certain task or client prerequisites.)
3. How can you make sure that both you and the service provider understand the goals behind the contract and the promised services in the same way?
4. How can you as a client motivate your IT service provider to set the priorities exactly how you need them?
🤔 Curious? Read more in our next articles – and follow us, so you don’t miss our latest posts. 😉
