Discussion on:

Anatomy of a successful consulting engagement

Or what questions do you have about it?

With their approach to the RFP, by going over and above just responding to the questions, TopDown showed that they knew their stuff...

However, it can be quite risky, especially for smaller projects, to show too much detail and expose significant aspects of the hard-earned experience in the initial responses. There is a strong possibility that the potential client might seek the lowest price option and hand over all of the key value added information to that vendor for implementation.

Pbviously this is not applicable in a project of this size... but certainly there are many organizations (state and local governments appear to be the worst offenders in this regard) that will put out RFPs and then not award them, but use all of the information gained for their internal project teams...

The fact that the project was successful also indicates that the original RFP was well scoped and properly defined....

The service I sell is not the plan, but rather the wisdom, intuition, and experience that I bring to the project. The plan hardly ever goes without a hitch, so you sell the fact that you'll see it through where others might fail. Yes, their plan was definitely scoped and defined well, but they still ran into unforeseen difficulties. It was their ability to make tactical decisions that saved the project.

I had an assignment, a small one, for an Adecco office in Middletown NY, it was a small project, a four station upgrade of Outlook to their NEW exchange server. Was given a script to follow ordered to follow it. Well, it would help if they had the name of the Exchange server right!!! Plus there were a few other errors in the migration script to, so I had to improvise and get it done right. Adecco? Please, spare me more pain. OH, I burned DVD of backup data for the users too if they ever needed it. Was never thanked for that either.

True, for normal hiring as well. To get a job you need to show why they can't do without you and then to keep the job you need to work yourself out of it.

???

Or something. Excuse me, I had a bit of a zen moment there ... and only one cup of coffee.

Also, about 'When things don't go right', focusing on the bottleneck is good advice for any endeavour. There are obviously many things that COULD be improved, but it's tricky to find/select THAT one which actually relieves stress and improves the functioning of the 'whole system'. Trouble is that bottlenecks often change location and disguises, but that is part of the fun.

Thanks Chip for the post, it is helpful to see cases where 'something went right'. Even though it did not go according to original plan, there were mechanisms in place that allowed it to make corrections along the way.