Teaching Someone to Fish

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  CRM   Stakeholder Management  

You know the old saying: "Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime." This concept is especially valuable today when we are trying to show customers our honesty in character and working to demonstrate how each of us differs from the competition.

While for some the idea of educating one's client with information from a knowledge and skills transfer process is a commonly practiced no-brainer, there are many industry professionals who don't like "giving away the farm" and prefer to treat solution techniques and tactics with a sense of mystery and miracle. This may give a contractor some control over maintenance and provide them with an edge over future project engagements, but for many clients it creates a concern over how proprietary this control is and can fuel feelings of dependence bitterness.

Delivering the Goods

Knowledge and skills transfer is sort of umbrella terminology for the activities involved in transitioning system development and control from one set of resources to another. This can take on many different forms and packages.

In its simplest deliverable, it is usually a document or series of documents that are provided at the closure of a project to help explain and potentially teach management and trained staffers how and why tasks were performed, the results …

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