It takes a whole village to…

This blog is – spoiler alert – not about technology. It’s not about the latest coding tweaks or the most efficient use of fancy applications – some of them I don’t even know how to pronounce their names. Instead, I’d rather write about the beauty of collaboration. But what else can you expect from a sales rep who focuses on building lasting personal relationships…;)

Some weeks ago, one of our long-standing clients issued a tender to find suppliers to support upcoming projects in numerous areas and technologies. Due to the wide range of expertise available at dbi services, we decided to participate in no less than eight of these lots.

As I am the sales manager responsible for this customer, I was tasked with responding to this tender. Anyone who has ever taken part in a public tender knows that you better block a whole lot of time in your calendar. Because you have to obtain all register extracts, certificates, signatures, sign-offs and stamps, CVs, reference use cases and last but not least, you have to get the official approval to provide external reference information.

Doing it alone would have been a nightmare and the result would have been… let’s say… mediocre at best.

But luckily, I am surrounded by a large number of colleagues who can and want to help me. Fortunately I can rely on countless experts in their fields. So it’s high time to celebrate this impressive team effort that helped me „get shit done“:
For speedy and accurate translations and marketing support, a huge „thank you“ goes out to Tanguy and Florence! For helping me keep keep track of accounting issues, thanks a heap, Bettina! For the deep dive into HR details, I bow to you, Magali! For management feedback and back-up, many thanks to David, Grégory and Yann. For technical expertise on Linux (Misa, I am impressed!), PostgreSQL (Daniel is my man!), OMrun, Test-Automation and RPA (Frank & Oli, you are the ones I am counting on!), Kubernetes and Ansible (Chay, Emmanuel, Kevin, what would I do without you?). For managing the delivery capabilities and the overall technical picture, I can‘t thank you enough Julia, Arnaud, Gérard, Alain, Christophe & Stéphane. For the sales support and challenging my approach, thanks a lot Martin, Yann, Pierre-Yves, Christoph. For the varied and valuable administrative and organizational support, thanks to Sabine, Aline, Jénia, Justine. For insights into our consulting capacities and expertise in various areas, I put my hands together for Alain, Jean-Philippe, Andreas, Karsten, Nicolas.

Loosely based on a well-known African proverb, I would like to conclude as follows: „To write a document, one person is enough. But to take part in a tender it takes a whole village.”
🙂