Providing Value to our Clients

A shepherd was herding his flock in a country pasture when suddenly a brand-new truck appeared out of a dust cloud on the farm road. The driver, a young man in an expensive suit and expensive hair cut leans out the window and asks the shepherd, "If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?"

The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a city-slicker, then looks at his grazing flock and answers, "Sure. Why not?"

The city-slicker parks his truck, whips out his laptop, connects it to his 3G network, surfs to a NASA site, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location feeding the coordinates to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an high-def photo. The young man then opens the digital photo and exports it to an image processing facility in New York. Within seconds, he receives an email on his smart phone that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a SQL database with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an email on his smart phone and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his miniaturized LaserJet printer and finally turns to the shepherd and says,

"You have exactly 1586 sheep."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep." says the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of his animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the cab of his truck.

The shepherd turns to the man and says "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a consultant." says the shepherd.

"Wow! That's correct," says the city-slicker, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required." answered the shepherd. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew; to a question I never asked; and you don't know anything about my business."

"…Now give me back my dog."


After reading this joke and realizing that there is a glimmer of truth in it, I started thinking about our business. Over the past few weeks we have put a lot of focus on the Statement Of Work (SOW) deliverables that we develop in the process of selling and starting new engagements. This is the first step in ensuring that we are providing the right solution to our clients and making sure that they understand what we are delivering to them. Sometimes we as consultants get mired in the minutae of projects and lose sight of what we were brought in to do as defined by these SOWs. We must all make sure that not only are we constructing quality solutions, but that those solutions MUST solve the correct problem. A $100 fire-forged, double gripped hammer may be the best hammer ever - but it has no use to someone who only deals with screws.