Screening and Interview Methods to Find the Right Consultant - Part 2

Previously, I wrote on the subject of finding the right SAP consultant and how you can avoid getting ripped off. That previous article, Screening Methods to Find the Right SAP Consultant, has been widely read and well accepted. Companies are tired of being ripped off with the lack of results or ROI from their large IT systems implementations.

At the foundation of SAP or any IT consulting is communication: clear, concise, easy-to-understand communication. If your SAP candidate cannot speak clearly about the subject, you should immediately be suspicious. If a consultant has some three, five, or more years of experience listed on their resume and even one full-cycle project, then they must demonstrate some basic skills, or they are likely a fake and a fraud.

Why would you hire a consultant who has a barrier to consulting? And you really have to wonder about any prior experience they have with someone who did hire them.

If they speak in technical jargon and cannot translate that jargon to normal conversation, then they may have never been on an SAP project. One of the key skills that every decent SAP consultant must master is helping client counterparts understand and translate SAP jargon into understandable business terminology. If they lack that skill, they probably lack the critical experience to ensure your project is a success.

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This article is part of a series that explains the widespread fraud involved with SAP, Oracle, and other business software consulting. For more extensive insight into the problem, and specific methods for dealing with it, please see some of these other posts:

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Important Consulting and Business Analysis Skills

Skills every consultant needs to have include the following:

Facilitation
Meetings
Process mapping
Business case (or whitepaper) development
Problem solving
Organizational dynamics

For some candidates, a few of these skills may be weak due to personality differences, interaction styles, depth of experience, or other reasons. However, if they are lacking in most or all of these skills, you are probably dealing with a fake. Even if the consultant who lacks these skills is not a fake, you probably do not want them on your project anyway. When it comes time to screen or interview them, you might want to think twice if you notice any language barriers in the language of the employees who will work with them.

Let’s look at the skills previously listed, one at a time.

SAP Consultant Facilitation Skills

On any large IT project, especially an ERP project which directly impacts the business and organization, there are:

requirements gathering sessions,
design sessions,
blueprint writing,
solution assessments,
problem resolutions,
fit/gap analysis,
business process design,
translation of SAP/ERP speak to business language,
knowledge transfer,
training,
and organizational change.

To do these activities, the consultant needs to be able to communicate clearly and translate application processes and requirements into intelligent business language. How else are you going to receive a decent blueprint, specification documents, or potential whitepapers explaining your options? If they are in SAP speak or other technical jargon, they are virtually meaningless to a business-driven project.

The ability to extract the key information (through facilitation skills) for all of these activities cannot be underestimated. In addition, communication skills are critical for knowledge transfer to your internal team.

Consultant and Business Analyst Meeting Skills

Strong communication skills and the ability to stay on task and on point are critical to a successful project. The consultant needs to at least have fair organizational skills and strong communication skills. Without strong, language-specific skills, the consultant will struggle to understand, capture, and summarize the key points of the meeting– or even keep the meeting on point.

In some cases, the key point of the meeting must be “socialized” or shopped around even before the meeting ever takes place. Sometimes, you have to win over naysayers or get key supporters on board so the meeting is more of a formal communication. You may need to address any legitimate objections key stakeholders may have. This requires language-dependent good listening skills, and strong communication skills to persuade, influence, and address objections or concerns. If there is a language barrier, there is also an understanding barrier. If this is the case, meetings are a waste of time.

SAP and ERP Project Process Mapping

Start to finish, A to Z, you must be able to look at a sequence of events and understand their dependencies and any gaps. This skill is central to design, blueprinting, and business needs. Disjointed patches of activities are not sufficient to develop a working process. Additionally, you must have strong enough language skills to understand the business terminology, and then translate that terminology into SAP terminology, and then transfer that understanding to the client-side participants.

You must also have a decent level of insight into what can be enabled by technology, and what are inherently manual processes. After evaluating a process, you need to simplify, streamline, and automate the complex. Any comprehension or communication gap will negatively affect this ability. If there are technical development requirements, do you think that language, understanding, and comprehension barriers will produce good specs for development? These barriers often cause a back-and-forth, wasting the high-priced developers’ and other consultants’ times.

Anyone can take the complicated and keep it that way– or worse, make it more complicated. The mark of skill and experience is taking the complicated and making it understandable and workable. The sign of innovation and exceptional skill is the ability to simplify.

SAP Business Case or White Paper Development

Blueprinting requires not only technical skill, but also local language-specific comprehension and writing ability. If there is a language barrier, you can forget about a well-done blueprint document, business case for a scope change, or white paper explaining the options.

How will the team understand all of the issues to present the appropriate pros or cons, or explain it correctly? How will they understand the complex inputs and outputs to translate them into formal requirements that make any sense?

Business and SAP Problem Solving

Whether it is ERP, CRM, BI, SRM, or other SAP applications, understanding how and where a particular business problem fits into the application space requires deep skill and experience. That requirement goes beyond what you can get through some self-directed training, a certification program, or even a single project.

Real problem solving skills require a level of knowledge and understanding of the business, the subject matter, the applicable technology together with some creativity. Language or communication barriers will make this a difficult process.

SAP Project Change Management and Organizational Dynamics

Along with all of these activities, you must also evaluate the company or organizational counterparts. These are often called core team members from the business. You must be able to assess the business area the application will touch on and consider the affects of certain changes on that organization. This deep understanding demands solid language skills to discern subtleties of the personalities in the organization. Language barriers impair the ability to assess and understand the cultural dynamics. When it comes time to evaluate the impacts of certain changes on the organization and how much change they can absorb, this lack of understanding will create problems. When there are gaps here, I see consultants constantly suggesting technical fixes, new application functionality, or scope changes where the organization is not ready to absorb the change. These suggestions do more harm than good.

Conclusion on Screening and Interview Methods for the Right SAP Consultant

SAP, ERP, and other large-scale IT projects are critical to your business and its functions. Done correctly, you can see great results. Done in the wrong way, and the results can be damaging to your business.

Some of these frauds can end up costing you so much that you would have been better off without the budget in the first place. Few companies recognize the amount of damage and the hidden costs on the entire project that these con artists end up creating.

One other thing to consider in all of this is if the “consultant” lied or cheated their way into the project, what else will they lie or cheat you out of? How much is enough? Where will the deception end? Since they are clearly stealing from your company through fraudulent means, what else will they steal?

When you are interviewing, screening, or even considering your next SAP, ERP, or other Technology consultants, shouldn’t you be sure you are getting what you pay for? Carefully consider the skills you need for success, and for Business to IT Alignment, and you will develop business-oriented solutions.