SAP Consultants: The Win-Win of Performance Measurement
By Richard Larrabee
Vice President, Optimal Solutions Integration, Inc.
CIOs face increasing pressure to ensure that the SAP consultants they hire deliver quality services at competitive prices. Likewise, SAP consultants face constant pressure to demonstrate their worth and to support their claims of experience, expertise and success. Monitoring each project with a clearly defined set of metrics that measures a consultant’s performance throughout the course of a project is a win-win practice for both clients and consultants.
Clearly, project success is of paramount importance to assure that the client ultimately get what they need. In tandem with this, however, we should never forget that project success should be of equal importance to consultants, as they want to build trust with a client - trust that will translate into future engagements. Also, to demonstrate a successful track record, which is vital to minimizing bench time and maximizing pay, consultants must continually add to their roster of recent, relevant references.
While it may appear self evident that a performance measurement program benefits both the client and the consultant, it can often prove difficult to devise and implement a
program that strikes a fair balance between the clients’ expectations and the consultants’ ability to deliver on time and within budget.
To be sure, identifying and clearly articulating appropriate metrics is key to the success of a performance measurement program. “What gets measured is what gets done” is a good truism to steer by when determining performance metrics. It also is imperative that performance metrics be tightly aligned to the business goals of a project, ensuring that a consultant’s effort yields appropriate results.
In addition, a good performance measurement program provides insight into the following:
| • A consultant's effectiveness and performance on project-specific goals • The quality and quantity of client-consultant communication • The clarity (or lack thereof) of project priorities • Accuracy regarding a project's objectives and/or deliverables en route to achieving stated goal(s) |
Regardless of the specific nature of a project, the primary function of a good performance measurement program is to describe what good quality will look like to the client, and to actually measure the quality provided – two things that all good consultants will agree help their cause. In the end, the performance measurement process records the history of the client/consultant relationship, and when projects succeed, this history is one of mutual respect, trust and understanding.
