Consultative Elicitation

Introduction:

I have been a consultant for a significant portion of my working career working mainly in Financial Services (Capital Markets principally), Retail, telecom as Vertical Domains, CRM and Offshore Development Process/Methodology Definition as Horizontal competencies in geographies ranging from North & South America to Continental Europe, Japan and APAC. This experience has stood me in good stead to understand the nuances of what to expect from customers who know something is not quite right but probably don’t know exactly what or how to influence the outcome positively. Consulting has been a much maligned term especially in India and some developing markets but one must know that before one can commence writing code or testing it – one needs to ensure the requirements are elicited and documented to the best extent possible. As one moves from effort based pricing to outcome based pricing, this is becoming critical to define ROC and ROI.

Consultants would always tell you that the customer never knows what they want to do. However, they almost always know what they want at the end of it all – the problem is that this ‘to be state’ is very often information driven and not data driven, its emotion driven and not facts driven and most times is individual driven and not organizational driven. Unfortunately few of us are experts in interviewing techniques (‘Elicitation’) and get customers to talk candidly about their issues, perceptions, opinions, tasks and bring them I into the context of defining necessities, needs, wants and desires. Sherlock Holmes once commented the issue with simple cases is the largesse in terms of clues and the good detective knows which is important and which are not – it’s often similar in Elicitation. Most consultative Elicitation commences from a position of extreme information overload but less reliable actionable data. So the first step is often to determine which the data elements are that need further elicitation and which need to be kept in abeyance. Let’s now understand how to approach such cases of Consultative Elicitation.

Research: I always tell people that the key to a good consulting effort is the background research one does on the prospect and areas of initially isolated concerns. The research needs to be comprehensive ranging from Market facing data (Revenue, Growth %, areas of growth, areas of growth vis-à-vis market, profitability, profitability around different business areas, strategic direction, cost of support, cost of operations etc), Internal Strategic Initiatives – Internal research data, HR management and initiatives, Press Releases etc. This would give a very good idea where the issues and concerns could lie thus focusing the attention much better during the next phases. This ensures the initial discussions and interviews become validation statements rather than Q&A sessions cutting out valuable time and increasing management attention. Articulating a research objective sets the stage for a successful interview.
Developing the Base Questionnaire - The right questions are those that help us get beneath the surface and understand the customer’s world, work, and concerns and validate assumptions. These would be more in terms of validating some of the data and associated conclusions one could have drawn from extensive research. This would result in either focusing more on the areas of concern earlier identified or going back to the drawing board for further focused research. So initially, it’s recommended that one speaks about overall objectives, options, directions and broad level concerns.
Developing a Good Questioning technique: It’s a good practice to clearly enunciate and understand the overall objectives internally before meeting the customer & commence asking questions. What do you hope to accomplish by interviewing the customer? Do you want to explore broad options or understand a specific business processes? A wandering, unfocused interaction will yield paltry results and frustrate the customer. Once you’ve defined the broad objective, brainstorm a list of all the questions, suggestions etc related to the topic. It’s a good practice to organize the questions in a set of matrices – on the horizontal plane from general to specific and familiar to unfamiliar & in the vertical plane around opinions, recommendations, perceptions, risks & emotional issues (including HR issues). The process of preparing questions helps to identify key topic areas to cover. Following a set list of questions isn’t the point: successful interviewers invest time in designing and testing questions—but then use them as a guide, not a script. As you prepare for an interview, consider different types of questions. Each type will serve a purpose and elicit a different response:
1. Context-Free Questions
2. Meta Questions
3. Open Ended Questions
4. Closed Loop Questions
5. Leading and Show Me Questions
6. Past-Present-Future Questions
Develop In-Depth Questionnaire Patterns: The key to elicitation is developing the detailed requirements is analyzing data obtained from Research, User Interviews, Manager Interviews etc and reverting with a series of if-else, what-if and but-if logic loops. These would enable the interviewer to focus on key core issues while ensuring the tangential ones and symptoms of problems get documented as such. You could think the data is adequate when all the data from Research, User Group Interviews, Other Interviews, and focus interviews is able to identify a set of concerns / issues (process, technology or people) which would explain at least 90% of the issues and concerns expressed.
Data Analysis Template: FTSC: One good practice which I have come across is to analyze all data on the basis of the FTSC dispersal – Foundation, Tactical, Strategic and Continuum. Basically it means that all issues or data could either be related to Foundation (base issues, typically operational and can be rectified by minor operational modifications) Tactical (short term, needs some operational and process tweaking), Strategic (medium term, market facing issues which need broader and senior management), Continuum (Broad Operational areas - fairly operationally efficient but need constant monitoring and efficiency checks).
Conclusion Template: The most critical aspect is the presentation of the issues, suggestions and recommendations. Always remember the client is almost always aware of the issues – the symptoms & sometimes the underlying causes – and tailor analysis to
1. Symptoms observed
2. Possible Causes
3. Probable Causes after data analysis
4. Criticality of causes
5. Recommendations – Process, Technology, Others
6. Suggestions – Process, Technology, Others
Some Pointers: Before you rush off to try out your interviewing skills, practice. Start with a colleague, and then try your interview with an internal customer proxy or subject-matter expert. Its always a good practice to work in pairs with the members taking turns to ask questions and BOTH taking notes. Its better to limit the questioning sessions to 4-5 hours in a working day and keep at least 30 minutes between sessions for note-sharing and data sharing. Avoid using this time to draw conclusions but use this solely to flesh all details and document them effectively. A quick 30 minute discussions with all interviewers at the end of the day – typically informal – is a good idea to get some first impressions about the people, who seemed very open and others who probably were not. At the end, just remember consulting is not rocket science – all it needs is a thinking mind, perception, an eye for detail and documentation ability. Its good to have the requisite domain knowledge but often I have seen its needed as a team – not with every individual.