Simple^4 Xiaoming Wang

Consulting business has been getting more and more market share across industries.

IT giants (Oracle, IBM, HP, SAP, SAS, Accenture etc ) have been doing this business for quite a long time. Most of the big enterprises have benefit from those IT consulting service by improving their management of Information system.

There are still lots of medium size companies and manufacture in south of China don’t have good ISIT strategies and Management system. Focusing on these customers, this would be an busness point.

Above, the possibilities of creating a new business growing point are obvious. Then how to run the business, in another word how to run an ISIT consulting company has been put on the table.

There are three keys for running such a business. They are “Client”, “Contract” and “Resources”.

Obviously, Client is the most important one of the three. No client, no contract , resources would be useless.

Client — Satisfaction

• Client’s satisfaction. KFS, in order to achieve Client’s satisfaction, there are several things we need to accomplish.

1. Create benefit which can be seen in Client’s finacial report
2. Cut down CTR
3. Management team and employees satisfaction.
4. Accomplish deliverables on time.

• What does Client really wants? It really does matter. Sometimes, Client is not 100% sure what they want. Consultant has to help Client to produce an equirement report.
• How Client want the deliverable to be delivered? Sometimes, consultant did an excellent job but did not deliver it in a right way. For example, Client want all the documents to be deliver in a Website with doc lib but we might deliver it in a hard copy. Although there are nothing different for the deliverables.
• Communication. Could not be less important. Before everything has been started, clarify the resposibilities of everyone involve in the project and build more than one communication tunnel and set up interface in the process of communication.

Contract — Achievable and different

• Contract template, don’t have to talk too much about it. A professiona template is enough.
• Bottom line, what we can do. What we can do in the period of contract.

1. Promise only what we can do and do well.
2. Know what we can learn and do well in a period of time (contract period)
3. Never tell Clinet what we can not do, but what we are not professional at.

• Breakdown into different phases

1. Break down contract into different phases, if the contract is too hard to be negotiated.
2. At least get one phase of the contract and try to get all the phases of the contract.
3. Avoid doing the phase that we are not good at.

• Budget of the contract, get a good negotiator to deal with. Any other good way?
• Market price, be aware of the market price of the business, try to know other biders’ bid in the competition
• Shining points, something different with other competitors. Something that they would care, maybe.

Resources: MIS + knowledge database + People — All of them are crucial

1. MIS (ERP) — Finance + PM + HR + File server (Document lib) + Website + Simple CRM + Software dev environment (Optional, for fun). MIS is for ourselves, for the continuing improvement and growing.
2. Knowledge database — Web based application with portal. “Tools”
3. People — Consultant, has to be or have

• • • Team player,
    • Business sense
    • Never stop learning.
    • Good code of English and Mandarin.
    • At least be professional in one scientific area.
    • Have more than one hobby.

Project management

It is a complicated topic, refer to A Guide To The Project Management Body of Knowledge

Key factors of success

Deliverables, credit, partner + relationship

For cooperation, policies:

1. There is no difference between employees. (Wal-mart)
2. Be creative, do things differently (BOC)
3. Open working environment (Platform)
4. Work as a team, there is only one team! (Tesco)
5. Everyone is talent. (From me?? haha)
6. Treat everyone as treat your self, life as one family (Tesco + Dalian Loco)

Notes and Definitions

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