Have you ever been on a project, or worse paying for a project, and you hear a resource (that you’re paying for) declare it’s their “first project”? No one wants that honor. Not in projects, not in health care, not in any aspect of your life are you going to want someone who doesn’t know what they are doing to attempt to handle your needs. 

I have admittedly grown a bit tone deaf to this objection from clients as I have led and trained many new hires with no background as they made career changes over the years. Most of them did great with little incident, even the ones that made the gaffe of telling C-Suite executives they are excited to be on their first project. 

But my perspective was challenged when my wife had our son (“go-live” after a 9 month project) just a few weeks ago. Most of my family works in medicine and they warned me that new residents were starting when my wife was due. They absolutely insisted we specify that no new doctors do any kind of hands on work like epidural or anything else critically important. So we did, and my wife’s anesthesiologist was someone who had been doing this for over a decade. The doctor started going through his questions but the last one just confused the hell out of me. He asked my wife if she had any missing or loose teeth.

So I asked, ‘what’s the deal with the teeth?’ The doctor then walked through how the anesthesia process worked, describing half a dozen scenarios and how/what he would adjust for each of them. Finally the doctor got to the end and said if things are emergent and time is a factor they would do general anesthesia and she would be intubated. If he had to intubate her, he needed to know if she swallowed/inhaled any teeth during the process so they could address that. The point here is that while Step A was likely the only step he ever needed to do, he had thought through the various use cases and planned for them. Efficient, effective…if he knew CPQ or billing I would have hired him on the spot. 

My advice to clients making vendor selections in this market is to go with people that know to “check your teeth.” People that know the ins and outs of your use case, what trips users up, what trips systems up, what holds up projects, and who has a playbook to deal with it all. 

Thunder just celebrated 2 years as a company, but many of us have been working together for over a decade in the Salesforce ecosystem. As a firm our average tenure in the space is over 13 years, and we hire very selectively “the best of the best”. Let us know what you want your business’ first project with us to be and we will let you know how we can help you get to that go-live (with the confidence that your vendor selection comes with all their teeth intact).