Changes to Consider for Remote Selection Projects
Elongation of Timeline
One of the biggest impacts brought about by the new virtual environments is the elongation of the overall project timeline. It is far more difficult to stay on track in a remote environment. This is primarily because there is not a captive audience since people who are working from home have other priorities and disruptions. These are competing with project tasks like requirements gathering and development of the business case to justify potential multi-million-dollar investments.
Regarding decision-makers involved, if there’s a topic that may have unanswered questions, in an on-site setting, the team can pull in people much more easily when needed. Being virtual takes that ability almost completely off the table. This adds time, but also adds to the issue of making sure they have the right decision-makers involved where appropriate.
Relationship Building
Consulting is a business of relationships. Being able to establish that trust and advisory partnership role quickly is challenging even in a normal project environment. But being restricted to remote settings presents different challenges. So, different tactics must be employed to build relationships and trust quicker, as well as be cognizant of the timeline. In a remote software selection project, as with implementation work, the relationship-building effort is something consultants must proactively work at with much more intent and focus.
There is also some risk to the consulting team not having ears and eyes on the ground when the client internally vets certain decisions and project activities. Not being close to stakeholders, influencers, and decision-makers makes it more challenging to ensure key project decisions are aligned.
Communications
As a consulting team, it’s also necessary to be more proactive about touching base with each other. When you’re on the ground at a client site, the natural, ad hoc conversations the team has are invaluable to accomplishing the project objectives and ensuring the best outcome for the client. Those conversations now must be scheduled. Especially for projects that cover multiple process areas, there are dependencies, interfaces, and outcomes that must be coordinated and aligned, not only for the system but also regarding business processes and organizationally. It is often in the project team room that these get discussed, but in a virtual environment, those conversations must be much more deliberate.
During the system demonstrations, consultants’ ability to read the room is taken out of play. We can’t see body language, nor is it always evident who is participating on the call or who’s really engaged. As such, some of the actual selection gets more difficult because there is more follow up required. The client may not be comfortable enough to stop the software vendor to ask questions or get clarification during the demo. We’ve seen clients hold their questions until after the demo, which requires follow up and adds to the project timeline. On site, we can handle questions that arise on the spot.
These may seem like minor things, but the goal is to help present all the correct information to the client so they can make the best software decision for the company.
