Excellence model - QA & Negotiation

When the requirements are sent to suppliers, the customer will receive a number of relevant offers for persons that the given vendor thinks matches the requirements. 

Consultant companies will have variable degrees of quality assurance processes, but all consultant companies will have commercial pressure for selling their employed consultants or maximizing the number of freelance contractors sold. 

Therefore, as a customer, you have to take ownership of the quality assurance process. It is that simple. Using the external workforce and staffing the individual projects with the optimal people each time is tightly correlated to what level of performance you get in the projects.

Specific advice on how you quality assure a given person for a given role are below:

1. Analyze CVs systematically according to the following parameters:

• Specific project experience using the must-have competencies in the request
• Specific project experience using the nice-to-have competencies in the request
• Specific experience as a contractor (as opposed to internal employee experience)
• Level of relevant education
• How similar previous customers are to your organization
• What is the average length of projects
• To what degree are the previous customer returning

2. Carry out personal interviews with the best-qualified contractors

• Use a carefully thought out structure for how you carry out the interview
• Include persons with substantial professional knowledge about the work that the contractor will carry out
• Discuss specifically how the contractor would start an execute the role
• Ask very specifically to the responsibility areas and results from similar projects
• Ask questions to reveal the abstraction level about the work of the contractor
• Check references from similar and recent projects.

Knowing to what extent a person will perform in a project is an art in itself. The contractor must have all the needed professional skills, but often personality is equally important.

“Negotiation” is included in this phase, because as soon as you start narrowing down your field of potential candidates, you are shifting negotiation power from you to the chosen vendors. Therefore, you must execute a negotiation phase before the interviews, and if you are using a digital platform, then this platform must support this.

Price is often the key parameter to negotiate, but you must always evaluate whether you can give away something that is easy for you to give, but of high value to the vendor. Examples could be flexibility in how and where the project is executed, or that you are willing to provide good references to the vendor if the contractor is a success.