Check this out - decent explanation of what people do wrong with RUP.

I found this article while looking at the services Ogilvy (the ad, marketing, PR, etc agency) provides. It discusses how the entire blogsphere (blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc) should (or could) be used for formal corporate marketing, and some of the guiding principles for their use.

As we were preparing some new marketing messages and ideas for our sales team, we ran into an interesting issue — we actually did not have the exact same view on what we did in life as a company. We have been very successful at executing our projects for clients over the last ten years, are pretty unique in what we do (building specialist business and technical solutions for capital markets clients), and we all have a general idea of what that has been. The problem is really how we actually articulate that at a formal but granular level ?

I ran an emperical excercise (basic marketing 101 stuff). I asked the mgt to answer the following questions:

• Who are we ?
• What do we do ?
• How do we do it ?
• Who do we do it for ?
• What is our value-add to clients ?

The results were very interesting — we did all agree on the general type of work we perform, but the way we communicated it was inconsistent, yet enlightening, but not surprising. This exercise validated the fact that we have never formally sat down and answered these questions as part of a formal communication plan (mainly because we have never formally done marketing since most of our worok has come through relationships and reputation - imagine we we actually actively market ourselves ?!!). It is clear that we all represent the company differently depending on the situation (not a bad thing), but we don't have the "elevator pitch" nailed. What was interesting was some people came up with some creative (and true!) ways of telling the story which we were then able to use in new ways of communicating our service offering(s).

I guess the acid test will be if we can't tell our own sales guys what our message is, they have no chance of telling our prospective clients … stay tuned as we sort it all out..

Our clients have addictive personalities. The number of times we have put people into clients on projects and can't get them moved on to other project is crazy.

The problem is as follows: a) plain and simple: our people are the best at what they do, and have a habit of blowing their clients away from a domain and technical perspective, b) SOWs come and go, and we all know that scope changes, schedules change, etc etc, so keeping SOWs in sync with reality is a tough job, and obtaining and keeping good people is a tough thing to do (once they have them, that's it in their minds).

It is the nature and culture of our people that they want to work on new and interesting projects (and so do we!), plus we want them to lead up new client and project opportunties.

So, how do you not upset your client when either the SOW expiry has come and gone and you have had other plans for your people, or you want to rotate them in a pro-active manner ?

Balancing your supply (sales pipeline) and demand (current staff allocation, bench and people you need to recruit) is the obvious thing, but reality is not that simple. I have always said look after your current clients before your future clients, and there are things you can do to actively plan and work with your clients. However, my biggest risk is always that clients DO get addicted to our people and sometimes you have to adopt the band-aid approach — rip it off, let it sting, then get on with life.

A couple of us went to see a prospective client yesterday. To cut a rather long story short, they need a team of real heavy duty technical talent to build out their application and technical infrastructure since their current consulting firm does not have the wherewithall to get the job done.

Also, buyers of products and services tend to think of the things in a different way than those doing the selling or execution, so the message and approach of a project needs to bridge that gap. I have mentioned some ideas before on this. However, one can only address most of buyer's objections and issues so far. There is a philosophical difference in mindset in how different people sometimes think of these projects (ie CFO vs PM vs vendor). Fundamentally, how can you ever 100% guarantee scope, time and budget to any client without something giving and breaking the financial vaiability of the project ? You can't. So therefore don't even bother trying to figure that out.

It is about trust, shared responsbility and risk mgt. (see this on trust as well). If you can't get the first two, forget it. Problems, dependencies and issues happen on every project and sometime unexpectedly — your solution/ approach needs to expect and embrace this.