Somebody asked me the other day whether I was still blogging. The answer I gave was "yes" I am, but I have not posted anything for a while.
The reality is that I have been caught up in MBA project deadlines, exams and a whole load of stuff going on in the office which has proven to be a distraction and a source of new material for this blog .... in time.
The twig finally snapped. I was in a meeting last week and the debate was raging about how to structure a customer solution and the associated proposal. Earlier in the day, I had seen on a PowerPoint slide the phrase "(re)setting the customers expectations". It got me thinking about why there was a need to (re)set a customers expectations?
My conclusion - it is due to Solutioneering. Plain and simple, nothing more and nothing less.
One definition of Solutioneering that I came across is "putting solutions before problems" (defined by D. Keith Robinson) and this describes exactly one of the fundamental reasons why both sales and product management often struggle to (a) scope a customer solution and (b) understand what the customer value proposition should be.
In the telecoms and systems integrator environments, we have no shortage of expert and highly skilled solutioneers. I bet that if one really checks, one of the main reasons why there is a gap between customer expectation and delivery, is simply because all of this talent has been focused on the development of a solution, without really understanding what the problem is that the customer is trying to solve.
So what are the pro's and con's of Solutioneering? This got me thinking and also back and the keyboard to examine this in more detail ...... in Part 2.
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