As pointed out in the introduction, IT consultancies apparently have not been subject to many research efforts. After conducting this exploratory study and getting an additional insight into the field, we have found several other relevant aspects, which could be examined in further studies. In addition to implementing extensions to our framework, its applicability could be tested on more IT consultancies with different business profiles, structures, and sizes. Moreover, the social aspect under the same topic of resource coordination, firm-internal as well as the client-consultant relationship, could be further investigated. More consideration could also be given to the adjustments within business strategy and staffing, as these are important aspects of our study, but had to be excluded from the scope.
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Appendices
Appendix A: Case study Interview questions
A.1
Process-related questions
A.1.1 Sales
• Can you describe shortly the ways you communicate and interact with:
– Team leaders – Project leaders – Management
• How do you proceed (after marketing) when you gain knowledge on a potential project? How could more information facilitate this?
• In which steps are project negotiations made?
• How do you maintain a portfolio of potential projects? How are volume workload, turnover, probability, etc. considered?
A.1.2 Team leaders
• At what stage are you introduced to new or potential project? Which informa- tion would be useful before that stage, possibly in more abstract form? (What would you like to know about these potential projects?)
• In which steps is resource allocation negotiated with other competence depart- ments, the project managers, and possibly sales? What information do you need to get from them, and in which intervals?
• Which strategic decisions do you have to consider right now? How are they communicated?
A.1.3 Project managers
• At what point do you gain knowledge of new or potential projects?
• In which way and steps is the knowledge transfer from sales to project manage- ment conducted?
• In which steps is project planning done, especially where are interactions with the departments in the planning process? How could more information improve planning reliability or speed?
Appendices
A.1.4 General management
• Which are the key performance indicators you monitor? How do you acquire information on them, and when?
• Which are performance or status indicators you would like to know more about, but which are not available, e.g. due to lack of data?
• Which variables should be controlled in terms of strategic decisions, and how should they be considered?
• What are the information requirements from each department?
• How do you see the different roles: project managers, team leaders, sales architecture. . . what are their responsibilities?
• What project planning decisions do you make? Prioritize projects? • What project planning responsibilities do the other managers have?
A.1.5 Architects
• At what point do you gain knowledge of new or potential projects? • How is your cooperation with sales? Project managers? Team leader? • In which way and steps is the knowledge transfer from sales to architecture? • In which steps is architecture/tasks planning done, especially where are in-
teractions with the departments in the planning process? How could more information improve planning reliability or speed?
• How independent are you in your planning of work?
A.2
Questions on current information system use
• What information systems do you use?• What information would improve your work practices? (table)
• What priority would you give that information on a scale from 1 to 10? • How much time do you spend in meetings, mails, or otherwise acquiring this
information?
• Would this also reduce the decision time? If yes, how much? • Would it require further discussion?
• Would it improve the quality of your decision? Can the improvement be quantified (less repetitions because of errors etc)?
Appendices
A.3
Questions on information system potential
• If department X needs information Y from you, could you provide it through an IT system?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how difficult is it to formalize?
Appendices
Appendix B: Case study Interview responses
B.1
Sales
B.1.1 Sales 1
After the initial contact with the client, sales introduces a “pre-sale person”, which is a staff member with knowledge within in the specific area. Within a negotiation between sales and the team leader of a competence department, which provides the competences offered, the pre-sale person is assigned. The team leader has the responsibility to understand which person has the best knowledge and then ask for that person’s time. Depending on the size of the project, sales might ask a staff member directly, if he/she can meet the client together with sales, to discuss the client’s needs. Sales is supposed to avoid this shortcut, and prefer going through the team leader, but in smaller projects they make exceptions.
Generally, the goal to sell a pre-study, where the company can get paid for the process of structuring the project. In this cases, the a pre-study can involve more people into the process of pre-defining the project. If it is not possible to place a paid pre-study, the company is basically working for free and hoping to get an order later on.
A solution architect is always involved in the offering process to define task and calculate the time needed to complete the project. Also, a project manager can be involved in this. The preliminary plan also includes suggestions for the composition of the project team. For estimation, also comparable past projects are reviewed. This forms the basis for negotiations with the client. Usually, the amount of meetings from first client contact to the agreement ranges from two to seven.
Once the agreement has been formed, a project leader or project manager gets assigned to the project to work from there. On a larger project, there is a steering group that consists typically of sales, project manger, architect and a client representative. If this steering group exists, it assists follow-up, decides in case of major changes of activities, and commercial issues; otherwise, commercial issues are deferred from project management back to the sales department.
Sales follows a standardized process, which can be described in the following steps: 1. Prospect
2. Identify 3. Confirm
4. Qualified Offer (supported by pre-study & internal negotiations) 5. Acceptance
Appendices
In general, cooperation with the other departments and negotiations is working very good. Sometimes it can be a problem to get a hold of the solution architect. When negotiating an architect with a team leader, the team leader is positive. The architect is also positive, but then when getting back to see what has been done. The architect does not have the time to do what he/she was supposed to do.
Sales feels that there are too many meetings with detailed technical discussion before a project can be sold. It is difficult to specify how much time spent in these meetings. Sales just wants to sell the product while the technically-oriented people want to have specifications and requirements of the product. Sometimes it feels that they are too technical instead of business oriented. Everything doesn’t need to be made in the perfect way, just make it.
Also, sales feels there is little time and effort spent on the pre-sale process. Especially when the pre-sale project is not paid for, because the customer does not want to pay for offers, low priority is given, and it is hard to get architects.
Currently, sales uses a CRM system. It supports the entire process, but does not necessary contain all contacts with the client. This system would also support handling support calls from the customers, and even has a project management module, but these are not used.
One of the worst things is to get to a client company and they start to ask specific questions, or address problems with other deliveries, that sales have no idea about. Sales would like the CRM system to work better to have pre-knowledge of the previous contact with the company to be prepared for meetings.
The CRM system they have could be very important for to have pre-knowledge about