From 2012 to 2016, Showtime ran a series called House of Lies, which was a comedy drama where a charming management consultant and his crack team used every dirty trick in the book to woo powerful CEOs and close huge deals.

And, unlike many consultancy teams, they were quite successful. There were TWO reasons for this.

1. When they worked together, they brought the A-Team.
   • The Face, Marty, played by Don Cheadle, who was not only charming, manipulative, and opportunistic, but skilled enough in business to nail the spin brought by
   • The Brains, Clyde, played by Ben Schwartz, who specialized in marketing and spin doctoring and could craft just the right messages for Marty to deliver (and, like the Marketing Mad Men, partied a bit too hard and struggled with addiction), and who would have his plans backed up by
   • The Techie, Doug, played by Josh Lawson, who was a genius in numerical analysis and statistics and could find the right numbers to spin any tale The Brains and/or The Face need to weave to make the sale, and this was all brought together by
   • The Toughie, Jeannie, played by Kristen Bell, who managed the engagements, supported the team, and made sure the clients were reeled in hook, line, and sinker. (Without her, the team probably would have fallen apart, especially given the egos that had to be managed on the team. Don’t overlook the importance of The Toughie!)
2. They came together, and even after falling outs, stayed together.

The third point is probably the most important.

A team is NOT assembled by a sales manager assembling four random consultants with “the right backgrounds” and throwing them on your project. Four random consultants who

• might not even speak the language when it comes to your problem domain,
• could be missing critical skills,
• have entirely different work styles, and
• are misaligned on what the right outcomes of a successful engagement for the client actually are!

An A-Team

• speaks the same language,
• have all the required skills between them,
• work well together and have already succeeded doing so, and
• are aligned on a successful outcome for the client.

In response to my LinkedIn summary on why you need The A-Team for Proper Selection Advice, someone asked how do you identify the right persons? The answer is, YOU DON’T!

The A-Team is already working together, delivering success. And in the case of the House of Lies, they succeed as a team by using their history together to effectively work together to sell the client a shared vision, even if the vision was one big lie. (So imagine the results you would get if you hired an A-Team to work for you, and not a consultancy that’s also an implementor that wants to maximize billable hours.)

In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, If no one else can help and if you can find them. Maybe you can hire, The A-Team.

Forty years ago, if you had a problem, you could hire the A-Team, and get a solution. They did what they were supposed to. That’s because there were only a few solutions; developers, implementors, and consultants worked under the same roof on the same team; and, due to the high price tag, the vendors worked hard on delivering enough value to keep their clients and get referrals for new clients.

But then the World Wide Web was invented in 1989 and by 1999, corporations were starting to embrace it not only for online business but for app delivery. SaaS startups burst onto the scene and we went from a few options to a few dozen to a few hundred options for standard office applications within a decade. At the same time, many doubled down on development, not implementation or integration, and implementation shops sprung up. Then consultancies decided that, no matter where they started (strategy, finance, operations management, etc.) they were all going to be technology advisory experts and opened big technology consulting and implementation shops, because they had the size, and the cash, to hire lots of warm bodies fresh out of university desperate to work for a renowned firm.

This is where and when solution selection and advisory began to break down. First of all, the consultants had no deep knowledge of the solution. Second, they had no deep knowledge of the domain. Third, the selection and advisory consultants had little understanding of the implementation requirements. And, due to a lack of deep economic and supply chain knowledge, they all ignored the increasing complexity of global business, the increasing complexity of the software solutions designed to support global business, and the increasing complexity of interaction across platforms and systems.

That’s why you need … The A-Team!

THE BRAINS

First and foremost you need someone who understands the big picture. The domain, the core processes that power the business functions, the levels of operational maturity and how to assess them. Someone who knows how to get to the core of the problem and what is needed in a solution and can lead the team to successful execution. This person ensures the focus is on what’s needed, which is often different than what you might think you want. That the inputs to each successive phase of the selection process are the right one. That the requirement strands flow from initial collaborative root problem identification all they way through final solution implementation and integrations. Someone who ensures every step of the process is designed to maximize your chance of success while being as efficient as possible. Someone who’s always thinking about you.

THE SMOOTH TALKING FACE MAN

Secondly, you need someone who can converse with all of the stakeholders in their language, put their fears at ease, and foster the necessary collaboration between themselves and the solution selection A-Team to help ensure a successful project. Someone who can is capable of securing the data and resources that are needed when they are needed and navigating the tough scenarios when vendors who don’t want a fair and unbiased selection process decide to get down and dirty and bypass the CPO and go straight to the CFO or CEO with fear tactics or unreasonable ROI promises. Someone who’s always there when the client needs someone to be there.

THE HOWLING MAD CRAZY TECHIE
(WHO CAN BUILD AND OPERATE ANYTHING)

You need someone who has a deep understanding of the technology to identify vendors that supply tech that match your should haves, to help you script the demos, to rip apart the RFX responses and demo claims, and give you real, unbiased, solution — and not marketing — based advice. Understanding that goes well beyond the limited knowledge you get as a solution implementor where all you do is set configuration options. You need someone who was trained in tech (not operations, or psychology, or “business” or whatever else gets them into consulting), who built tech from the bottom up, who understands not only what stacks can deliver but what algorithms can deliver, and can assess not only what the tech does now but what it will actually be capable of with further development (as many vendors will claim anything you need is on the roadmap, even though they know that they are not capable of building some of the promised technology as their architecture just wasn’t built to support it).
In addition, this is someone who has spent a large amount of time reviewing and studying every solution they can get their eyes and hands on, not just a small set of clients or the big vendors that dominate every big firm analyst map. Some who loves tech and has lived tech their entire career from even before they entered university/college and through at least a decade of hands on experience (and at least five years of broad space review and experience).

THE TOUGH ONE

When the going gets tough, you need someone who can do the heavy lifting and brute force the project to conclusion. The critical support person who helps the brains with all the stakeholder interviews, ensures the crazy techie has everything he needs, makes sure the vendors get their responses in on time, and runs the project, through fear and intimidation if it comes to that, but usually with a strong, silent, honest-to-goodness resolve to get the project done right, no matter what. Someone who pities the fools not wise enough to engage the services of a team who’s only goal is solving your solution selection problem and moving on to the next engagement after a job well done (and not trying to find ways to hold you hostage and add endless billable hours to the project). Someone who alone has more heart then you will find in entire implementation teams.

But if you don’t believe me, go ahead and keep hiring The F Team. You might be part of the 12% they succeed for (or 6% if its a Gen-AI project). That’s at least a one in ten chance of success for a regular technology selection and implementation and one in twenty chance of success for a Gen-AI technology selection and implementation. Still better odds than the lottery, right?

Myself, I’d prefer odds of success of at least 4 in 5. But, as they say, you do you.

In our last posting we told you that solution selection is a seven stair methodology, and that the vendor assessment step was itself a seven step process. It’s not just as simple as taking a vendor pool, pulling five names out of a hat, and issuing an RFP, even though some consultancies would like you to believe that it is. But all that does is get you to a wrong conclusion fast.

Vendor selection takes time, sometimes longer than you want, but when you get the right solution, it’s always worth it in the end. Here’s the process outline.

1. RFI Creation

The first step is to create an RFI that accomplishes two things:

1. verifies the vendor has the necessary must-have functionality to meet core needs
2. collects the necessary information for rapid fire vendor elimination so you don’t waste time on a vendor that the business can’t accept

2. Collaborative RFI Review

Once the consultant or the analyst does their initial review, does their initial scoring, draws their initial conclusions and documents the rationale, the next step is to work through the RFI collaboratively with the client to make sure that every vendor invited back is not only acceptable to the client, but both parties understand the reason why vendors were cut.

3. Qualifying Demo

Before the full RFP, a demo verifying the promised must-have functionality must be taken to make sure what was written is currently in production and that the vendor truly understood the requirements. This can be considered phase two of the rapid fire elimination phase and strengthens the reasoning for any vendors pushed forwards.

4. RFP Creation

The next step is to create a full RFP that:

• goes beyond the core and includes questions related to the should-have and value-add functionality appropriate to your needs (not some random feature list)
• allows all organizational requirements for vendor onboarding to be evaluated
• allows for an assessment of the depth and breadth of services and training provided by the vendor
• contains additional questions designed to elicit the input necessary to answer any questions that come up from the RFI and initial demo review
• address all of your business requirements (not just the ones that permit rapid fire vendor elimination)

5. Collaborative RFI Review

Once the consultant or the analyst does their initial review, does their initial scoring, draws their initial conclusions and documents the rationale, the next step is to work through the RFI collaboratively with the client to make sure that the client’s final two/three vendors are not only appropriate, but all of the strengths and weaknesses that can be assessed are understood.

6. Deep Demo Specifications

You need to give each vendor their own demo script that you want them to execute because it’s your problems you need to see solved, not their best whizz-bang features that look good but function poorly.

7. Decision

After the consultant provides their deep dive analysis of the demo and their overall vendor assessment, using all the information at your disposal, you make a decision that you believe will best serve your organization.

In other words, it’s a methodical, deliberate, process that takes what it takes because that’s the only way to ensure you get the right solution. But it will be worth it because the right solution will bring an ROI of at least 5X while increasing efficiency between three-fold and ten-fold once adopted, but the wrong solution will be an albatross around the necks of every employee that depends on it.