Professional Services Professional: Operational Catalyst Training

Operational Catalyst Training Outline

• Creating a Customer Services Excellence Culture

  Communicating without alienating

  • Encouraging your customer to talk by listening persuasively
  • Limiting use of jargon and speak to your listener’s concerns
  • Creating awareness about what and how you communicate, guarding against conflicting messages

  The Expectations Challenge

  • Using the ‘That’s not it’ strategy to help a customer describe their needs
  • Challenging your assumptions about customer needs and be an information-gathering skeptic
  • Studying problems from your customers’ context

  Perception is reality

  • Clarifying customers’ perceptions of a service and their resulting expectations
  • Ensuring customers know what to expect
  • Assessing customer requests where it is appropriate and learning to say ‘no’ so it sounds like ‘yes’

• Project and Implementation Fundamentals

  Knowing your stakeholders

  • Diagnosing your stakeholders’ interests and attitudes to a planned change
  • Classifying the key influencer with the most power
  • Determining your stakeholders’ resistance and how to engage them

  Shaping your engagement strategy

  • Targeting where you want your stakeholders to be
  • Developing a user story and connecting your proposition with an explicit beneficial outcome
  • Ascertaining the deposits and withdrawals you need to make in a stakeholders’ “relational bank account”

  Planning your engagement

  • Pinpointing your Gatekeeper(s) and scheduling communication to maintain engagement
  • Creating compelling, sticky, memorable messages
  • Classifying your signal-to-noise ratio to make your messages clear and heard

• Dealing With Urgency and Escalations

  Controlling the scope

  • Documenting the results of change control and maintaining the validity of the configuration
  • Specifying effective requirement(s) – unique, current, consistent, understandable, verifiable, traceable and prioritized
  • Capturing and assessing the impact of any change on the constraints including: time, cost, scope, change, risk resource

  Being clear on your BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement)

  • Focusing on their “What’s In It For Me” (WIIFM) and optimizing the benefits for both parties
  • Earning the right to be heard by listening first
  • Describing the non-negotiable aspects of your own position
  • Being clear about your own fallback position before negotiating

  Action is everything

  • Practicing intentional conversations using open questions
  • Ensuring people see that you are responding to their concerns
  • Checking you are not procrastinating on the uncomfortable business of contacting someone difficult