Client/stakeholder pay to have a consultant solve a problem on their behalf. The actual problem is not important for the purpose of this discussion. What is important however, is that clients expects an equitable exchange of value (the output of the consultant’s efforts) for their money (the client’s input) during a reasonable amount of time (the mutual investment).

The model pictured above is a generalization of how most client-consultancy relationships work. The client pays to have their problem solved, with the expectation that the resulting solutions is the best possible output that they can get from the consultant.

A rational person would not happily pay for mediocre results when they could get better quality elsewhere with the same budget.

It’s a given that most clients don’t really care about the implementation details— instead, they care about the quality of the outcome. Consultants however, should not only care about the quality of the outcome, but more importantly, the effort required to achieve the outcome.

Apples vs Bananas vs SaaS

If two equally skilled employees, with the same budget (time and money), and constraints are tasked with the same job. The employee that spends a larger portion of their time on billable non-deliverable activities (emails, reports, status meetings, project administrations, etc.), will produce an outcome with lower quality than the other employee.

The picture below attempts to visualize non-deliverable activities vs deliverable activities. The disparity between the two, non-deliverable vs deliverable, differs based on several different factors including:

• Team cohesion;
• Department management;
• Company bureaucracy; as well as,
• Sector inefficiencies; and (possibly),
• Regulatory environment.

A performant employee, is a happy employee. Happy teams perform better, resulting in better outcomes for the client — a win-win solution!

Productivity tools can, and do help to reduce the instances of billable non-deliverable activities; buying back the consultants precious time. The best-in-class of these tools operate as software as a service (SaaS) running in the cloud. They facilitate improved team communication, 3rd-party software stack integration, and several other cool (yet disjointed) features. So what’s the problem?

All tools come with a learning curve and SaaS tools are no different. Further, there is often stigma attached (security, platform outages, governance issues, hidden and recurring cost, etc.) to their use that hinder full client/stakeholder and team buy-in. Additionally, they have their own set of unique baggage which can add to the non-deliverable activities. Unfortunately also, the agendas of some SaaS vendors are not aligned to those of their customers, but instead to lofty technological or business ambitions — such as:

• becoming the next Uber of X — insert buzzword here;
• becoming the next Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, …whomever;
• replacing this, that or some other technology;
• becoming a unicorn — yes this is actually a business term.

The way forward: Activity vs Outcome metrics

I want to help people to perform better.

Being able to spend quality time, engaging with family and friends or other social activities is important; being forced to work overtime due to an inefficient processes is less so. The solution lies in finding ways to improve the employees ability to deliver billable outcomes, while simultaneous reducing the non-deliverable activities. This would most likely reduce the cost of doing business, resulting in a happier customers!

The solution to providing customers with better value for money lies in Activity vs Outcome metrics. Getting rid of the disjoint features of SaaS productivity tools, and providing clients with a clean solution that gets them to do their work better, their way is a mission; but, it is one that we have started.

Stay tuned.

-harold campbell

Notes:

Overcome the most feared cloud security issues in 2015:
http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/Overcome-the-most-feared-cloud-security-issues-in-2015

Performant:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2112743/what-does-performant-software-actually-mean

SaaS: Pros, cons and leading vendors:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/saas-pros-cons-and-leading-vendors/

Securing Sensitive SaaS Using Cloud Access Security Brokers:
http://www.gartner.com/webinar/2961418

The Death of Big-SaaS:
http://www.aestiva.com/web/htmlos/blog-gettingautomated-the.death.of.big.saas