Broaden your Horizons

This one was a consultant’s dream. The customer was close enough to walk to from our office! I could do most of the work at my office, and only have to go to the customer when we needed to show progress or drill down on requirements.

The scope looked easy-peasy. It was a Sales Force Automation project: convert a lead tracking system based upon 3x5 index cards to a sleek laptop based system with a workflow aspect so the users (and senior execs) could see how many leads were in each status.

Our clients gave us access to two people, the manager of the sales team and the number one salesman. The manager was in his 30’s and was tech savvy. The salesman was in his 50’s, and, while not tech-phobic was more … tech-naive, shall we say? Between these two, we were assured, we’d have everything we needed to put together a first-rate system.

The development platform was one of those 4GL products that were popular in the 90’s: User Interface, server, and database all in one neat package. Build the system, create a runtime version, install it on a laptop. It would phone home every night to pick up leads in a CSV format, load them into the database, and present a nice, tidy list for each member of the sales team.

Over the course of a month or so I wrote the workflow code, designed the UI and some reports, figured out the data download, and got the communications debugged. We went back to the manager and salesman a few times to make sure we had the workflow down exactly as the star seller envisioned it.

The OOPS!

Finally, the big day! Time to show it off to the whole sales team! I walked into the room and saw that the rest of the sales team was considerably younger than our star. In fact, they were all at least half his age. My boss started thru the presentation of the system, and got a barrage of questions.

Most of the questions included some form of the phrase “but, that’s not how I do things.” Yup, the younger generation had an entirely different perspective on selling and the steps they’d go through, and it did not match in the slightest how the star seller worked!

We were able to make some adjustments to give the younger crew a better experience, but the budget was all used up, and I never found out how much the system was used over the next few years.

The Lesson

Today’s lesson: push for more voices. Don’t rely on one or two people to give you the whole story. That limited view might ruin your project.