I have spent most of the 24-years of my professional life in IT, consulting and software development. Maybe that is long enough to have and share my stance on procurement, buyers and alike practices.
Every organisation has the right to not work with me.
Every organisation has the right to deem the value potentially realised through our collaboration as insufficient.
Every organisation should absolutely consider the return expected on spending money on my expertise, skills and effort. Even if the consequence is to not work with me.
My observations indicate that the commonly applied strategies by procurement, buyers and alike are different. Common practice is to belittle my expertise, change the estimates on the work needed and blindly cut my proposed day rate.
I have no sales machine to counter such strategies. Fortunately, as that would just maintain the ridicule. I do preserve the right to push back, regardless the impact on any chances to collaborate. I preserve the right to not being treated like a discountable commodity. We probably have very different definitions in mind when this is labeled as “not professional”.
Personally, I would rather starve (so to speak) than give in to the humiliating and belittling line of approach commonly seen in sales and buying procedures.
Warm regards
Gunther
ps. Thank you for caring, but that ‘starving’ part was intended figuratively. There are plenty of good folks out there that, somewhat surprisingly maybe, do want to properly partner with me.
Hi Gunther, last week i refused to write a proposal with planning, approach etc etc for a workshop of 0,5 day. The customer asked 3 suppliers to write such an proposal. Which means: 3 (agile)sales organisations are writing approaches (lets say 1 hour, optimistically), the customer has to read them, make choices, get approvals and back up from procurement probably. So..if you want motivated and good sales, if you want to treat your suppliers right and dont waste their time just to meet compliancy regulations rules, than think about “working together with supplier/customers over processes and tools”.
Its of course easy to refuse to write the proposal. And sadly enought this customers does not hire the best there is in the market :-).
In another situation i also refused to write a transitional plan for the agile transition. The customer was very willing to pay for it! Just to have the plan. I proposed to sit down together for some backloggrooming and planning together with him and his management team in stead of writing plans for them. I think i saved them 3 months of consultancyfee!.
I am looking for some more examples, anyone?