Client engagement
Author: Tom Bergman
Project: Nightingales Medical Trust | Eldercare
Year: 2015
Bangalore, India
Since coming to the School of Information in the fall of 2013, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a variety of clients on a wide range of projects. I had thought about participating in GIEP during the summer of 2014, however, I decided to apply instead for the 2015 program, so that I could have an extra year’s worth of experience. I suppose my thinking at the time was that I’d be able to be more prepared for working with a client on the other side of the world, with a user population I can’t easily interact with. I guess there are some things that you can’t prepare for!
Working with a client that is located on the other side of the world has definitely come with its own challenges. The consultant/client relationship, on its own, is always a tricky one. The client frequently comes to the consultant with an idea of what they want, and the consultant tries to develop the best solution to the client’s problem. But there is invariably a good deal of trust that must be earned—the consultant needs to demonstrate to the client that they know what they are doing. In my previous experiences, this has often come easily, when I have interned at various companies and organizations.
It’s quite a different situation when you only can get an hour Skype call with your client once a week and you, the designers, are unable to directly interact with your target population. One can also imagine how the client must feel—especially in my project, where we are developing a web portal for elder care, there is a significant amount of cultural knowledge that many of my group members simply do not have. It’s not totally unexpected then that there may be some hesitance on our client’s part to put so much trust into a student group from another country to develop a solution that will work for their people. And, if I am honest with myself, the client would be right in a lot of ways. There is still much I have to learn about our target population—and many questions I might not be able to answer until I am in India.
This experience has caused me to rethink how I approach the client interaction, how I negotiate and how I phrase things—because although a one hour Skype call might not seem like that much time, when that is all that you have a week to meet with your client, it becomes extremely valuable. We used to make calls with our client after forming a vague agenda in our heads on various talking points. Now, we enter these meetings with fully prepared and detailed agendas, in order to make sure that our ideas come across exactly as we want them to. It has been a process learning how to best manage these interactions, but it is one that I imagine that it will be very applicable to the rest of my career.
The skills that I am learning—from SI, from GIEP—may not be the knowledge of how to be prepared for anything. Rather, I think the skills that I have been learning are more about how to handle a situation that is new and you were never trained to handle, but you know how to adapt to. I think that these skillsets are a lot more valuable in a world that is constantly changing.
Project: Nightingales Medical Trust | Eldercare
Year: 2015
Bangalore, India
Since coming to the School of Information in the fall of 2013, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a variety of clients on a wide range of projects. I had thought about participating in GIEP during the summer of 2014, however, I decided to apply instead for the 2015 program, so that I could have an extra year’s worth of experience. I suppose my thinking at the time was that I’d be able to be more prepared for working with a client on the other side of the world, with a user population I can’t easily interact with. I guess there are some things that you can’t prepare for!
Working with a client that is located on the other side of the world has definitely come with its own challenges. The consultant/client relationship, on its own, is always a tricky one. The client frequently comes to the consultant with an idea of what they want, and the consultant tries to develop the best solution to the client’s problem. But there is invariably a good deal of trust that must be earned—the consultant needs to demonstrate to the client that they know what they are doing. In my previous experiences, this has often come easily, when I have interned at various companies and organizations.
It’s quite a different situation when you only can get an hour Skype call with your client once a week and you, the designers, are unable to directly interact with your target population. One can also imagine how the client must feel—especially in my project, where we are developing a web portal for elder care, there is a significant amount of cultural knowledge that many of my group members simply do not have. It’s not totally unexpected then that there may be some hesitance on our client’s part to put so much trust into a student group from another country to develop a solution that will work for their people. And, if I am honest with myself, the client would be right in a lot of ways. There is still much I have to learn about our target population—and many questions I might not be able to answer until I am in India.
This experience has caused me to rethink how I approach the client interaction, how I negotiate and how I phrase things—because although a one hour Skype call might not seem like that much time, when that is all that you have a week to meet with your client, it becomes extremely valuable. We used to make calls with our client after forming a vague agenda in our heads on various talking points. Now, we enter these meetings with fully prepared and detailed agendas, in order to make sure that our ideas come across exactly as we want them to. It has been a process learning how to best manage these interactions, but it is one that I imagine that it will be very applicable to the rest of my career.
The skills that I am learning—from SI, from GIEP—may not be the knowledge of how to be prepared for anything. Rather, I think the skills that I have been learning are more about how to handle a situation that is new and you were never trained to handle, but you know how to adapt to. I think that these skillsets are a lot more valuable in a world that is constantly changing.
