Application & Business Support, the shadow team

dbi services is well known for its high level expertise in technical topics such as Databases or Middleware but not only! 

We also have a dedicated team, Application and Business Support, to support our customers in turning their projects into success.  

I’m part of this team since almost 8 years  mainly working as a Service Delivery Manager for a huge ECM project in a Top 5 Pharma company. 

So today, I decided to write this blog to share my experience and my feelings about the past years.  

First, there are two key points to fit dbi spirit and customer expectations :  

– #bepassionate, every challenge is an opportunity to learn something new  

– #besharing, our work is based on strong technical skills and we are always happy to share it with our customers to move in the right direction. 

Basically what are we doing as a Service Delivery Manager?  
I like to resume it in one sentance: “Make sure the customer gets what he pays for”.  

behind this short formula, there is a huge amount of work, particularly when we deal with big teams, hundreds of servers in a Worldwide company. 

What does that really mean? 

Our main responsibility is to ensure the service we manage delivers what users needs. 

But not only, especially in a controled environement like in the pharma industry, we need also to ensure we comply with the defined processes and regulations. 

Additionally one of our day to day challenge is to permit Engineers to properly work and improve the service  with the smallest possible impact for the end-users. 

This part requires, on one hand, good technical skills to understand the constraints, to evaluate the impact and priority of doing or non doing something, and on the other hand good relational skills to accommodate the demands of all the parties, to transform an IT problem into something understandable by everyone and sometimes to influence the final decision. 

How can we do that? 

First of all, it is key to understand how this customer works, assimilate quickly the processes and policies in order to address the needs in compliance with the rules. 

Then we also need to federate all the teams together, we are all in the same boat and we have the same goal at the end. It was, for me, one of the most challenging barriers to cross in a previous experience, where all the teams blamed each others for delays, things not done and so on. 

It took time to know each others and build a trustful relationship, everyone involved in the project is important and brings his skills to the “community” and now we save a lot of time because we can rely on each other and progress confidently. 

I’m probably too passionate and could talk/write about my job all day long, but you, readers, you will start getting bored. 🙂 So I will conclude this first blog about our Application and Business Team, by something that, for me, also makes the difference in the way we manage things. We are externals, so we know the rules of the games and we know we are here only contributing for a certain period of time. Thus, we can clearly be honest and realistic by telling the truth, whereas an internal employee could have some thoughts to express his opinion for multiple reasons like politics, friendships,… For me this is a great advantage of being a consultant as it helps to reduce the stress that the job can generate. 

If you enjoyed reading this blog and want more about project management, feel free to let me know in comments.