The Red Oak Approach
The Feedback That Sparked a Reflection
During a feedback session at project close, a recent customer remarked to me that Red Oak consultants were ‘humans who can talk technical’ and he contrasted this with other HPC suppliers who were ‘techies talking to humans’.
I took this piece of feedback as a compliment. I have spent years working alongside our fantastic technical consultants delivering projects; in my experience, when someone thinks about the role of technical consultant, it’s all about the technical.
Their mind does not really go to ‘people skills’ or ‘enablers of success’. Yet at Red Oak, we believe that this is exactly what defines a good technical consultant.
Navigating a Range of Stakeholder Perspectives
Stakeholders in customer organisations fall into recognisable buckets: enthusiastic about HPC technologies, knowledgeable, pragmatic or just bamboozled.
Very occasionally, there will be a senior decision maker and budget holder on a project who is indifferent and uninterested.
So there is a whole range of behaviours and points of view for the technical consultant to manage right from the start of a project.
Add to that the fact that HPC is a specialised area, and customers who can be very competent in enterprise IT, can often be out of their knowledge zone when it comes to HPC.
When Technical Focus Becomes a Blind Spot
Nonetheless, during a technical project, the focus from everyone involved understandably tends towards the technical and the technology of whatever flavour of HPC is in play.
This behaviour is even more pronounced if a CSP (Cloud Service Provider) or an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) are actively involved; again, understandably, their drive on the project is to produce as positive an outcome as possible using their technology.
But relentless focus on the purely technical often leads to particular outcomes:
Firstly, the technical work can be presented to the customer as a set of sequential steps and as long as it is done the right way, success will come…… Except that no customer measures success by deployment or installation; the customer measures success by what can be done with the technology.
Secondly, this approach implicitly assumes that the technology is being configured into a ‘pure and clean’ environment.
But customer environments are messy affairs, littered with specific quirks, varied security protocols, ‘white elephant’ technology that now has to be included to justify it’s cost and so on.
Thirdly, deeply technical conversations can become quite exclusive and excluding.
And those who are left behind in these types of conversations usually include the very people who will be using the technology.
Defining Project Success: It’s About the People
It is all too easy to get deeply interested in technical details and to forget that, both during the project but especially once the project has ended, there will be a group of people who will be using the HPC to do their work.
And it is these users and their work that determines the success of the technical project: can the users work more efficiently and/or faster?
Can they do more/better/more complex work? Can outputs be more accurate? Can more collaborations happen, or can first-rate researchers be attracted to the organisation?
If the answer to these questions is yes, then demonstrable value has been enabled by the HPC technology.
The technology is a means to an end; the real value is added by the work that can be done by people.
We write in reports and state in meetings (and give the same message to our own employees) that the most important asset that any organisation has is its people.
Listening First, Then Building
When our technical consultants start work on a project, managing the diverse attitudes mentioned above, one of the first activities we undertake is to talk to people.
We are always interested to understand the work that people do, what presents barriers, what they would like to be able to do, what they would like to change.
We want to hear the negative as well as the positive.
It is these conversations that influence the technical work: if we understand how people need to work, we understand how the technology needs to function and be adjusted from the ‘standard’.
User Engagement Is Not Optional
Conversations with users also perform an important role relating to success: if the users have been listened to and concerns or fears can be addressed, they are more likely to ‘buy in’ to the decisions and implementation.
On a few projects we have worked on over the years, where user needs have not been central, that shortcut has resulted in less engagement back into the project from users.
Making the Complex Understandable
Technical projects usually have a good number of non-technical stakeholders involved, including project managers who sometimes have no background in these types of projects.
There is something about HPC technology that makes the non-technical mind panic: maybe it is the unfamiliar language or an inability to interpret or imagine what is being discussed.
But one of the key behaviours we want our technical consultants to bring to their work is the ability to explain highly technical concepts with words and in a way that ‘ordinary’ people can understand.
I have been known to tell new consultants to ‘imagine you are talking to your granny!’
It’s Still a Project – Just a Technical One
Real mastery is not blinding people with your command of technical language, but the ability to explain something quite technically specialised in simple terms.
When you put the technical language to one side, what remains is that best practice in project management holds true for HPC technical projects too.
In other words, if you are a stakeholder who understands the business and structures of your organisation, understands it’s goals and success criteria, those are the most important things to bring to the technical project.
The technology and the technical work are the means to that end and will be managed by our consultants.
The Red Oak Consultant Skillset
Obviously, there are plenty of times when deeply technical conversations are needed. For a successful project outcome, the technical work must be done to a good standard.
Technical competence is something that Red Oak values highly – because it is fundamental to our business.
So, a high level of technical competence, the ability to talk to a range of stakeholders, the ability to write comprehensible reports, the ability to manage diverse views and beliefs about HPC, a commitment to good project outcomes for the customer…….
These are the behaviours that Red Oak encourages in our technical consultants.
But it is also an unusual skill mix, so how do we find these people?
Hiring for Mindset, Not Just Skillset
Although it may be surprising for an HPC consultancy, we don’t recruit on the basis of technical expertise.
That can be learnt with sufficient time, experience and training.
What can’t be learnt is intelligence, an enjoyment of learning and a level of soft skills.
The mindset we want to cultivate in our technical consultants mixes a deep interest in technology, a curiosity about our customers and their work and a willingness to learn new skills.
In return, Red Oak invests a great deal of time, support and training to develop consultants who possess real expertise and can deliver excellent technical work.
Dee Chadwick
Operations Director
Red Oak Consulting
