Five questions to ask any ICT advisor.
Public-sector clients are routinely pitched ICT advisory engagements: capability assessments, supplier reviews, transformation roadmaps, governance maturity studies. The proposals look broadly similar. The deliverables look broadly similar. The actual experience of the work, three months in, diverges sharply. Five questions, asked at the engagement letter stage, surface the differences before the cheque is signed.
1. Who does the work, by name?
The first question is whose name appears at the bottom of the analysis. Many firms write proposals featuring senior partners by name and deliver the work using a different team made up mostly of junior staff. This is the consulting industry's longest-running structural feature and it is not always disclosed.
The clean question: which named individuals will be on this engagement, what proportion of the work will each deliver personally, and who signs the final deliverable? The answers vary widely. A small advisory firm will name two or three people and the named people will deliver the work. A large firm may name a senior partner whose actual time on the engagement is a few hours a month.
Neither model is wrong in principle. But the entity that pays for a senior advisor and receives a junior delivery team has overpaid. The question is whether the firm is willing to write the named people and their time commitments into the engagement letter.
2. What is the discovery fee, and is it paid separately?
A serious ICT advisory engagement is rarely priceable on the basis of the brief. The brief describes the problem the client perceives; the diagnostic often surfaces a different underlying problem. A firm that refuses to do paid discovery before fixed-price build is either over-confident or trying to lock in a budget that exceeds what the work justifies.
The right structure is a small priced discovery (typically two to four weeks, fixed fee), at the end of which the firm produces a written diagnostic and a proposal for the main engagement, priced on the diagnostic's findings. The client retains the right to engage someone else for the main engagement, or to cancel if the diagnostic doesn't justify continued work.
A firm comfortable with this structure is signalling confidence in its own diagnostic and respect for the client's optionality. A firm that resists is signalling that the proposal economics depend on the client committing before the work is properly scoped.
3. Who signs the deliverables?
Deliverables in advisory work are signed documents. The signature is a representation that the work meets professional standards and that the signatory stands behind the analysis. The question is whose name and credentials appear at the bottom.
In small advisory firms, the principal who led the work signs personally. In larger firms, deliverables are signed by a partner on behalf of the firm. The legal weight of each varies, but the symbolic weight is what matters to the client: a named, credentialed individual who can be contacted directly if a recommendation later turns out to be wrong.
The question to ask: can I receive the final deliverable with the signature of the named principal who led the work? The right answer is yes.
4. What is the firm's professional indemnity insurance?
Professional indemnity insurance covers the firm against claims arising from its advisory work. The cover level is a signal of how seriously the firm takes its own work. A firm with R10 million of PI cover is in a different risk class from a firm with R200,000.
This question is rarely asked by procurement officers and rarely volunteered by firms. Both sides treat the contract's limitation-of-liability clause as the answer. The clause limits the firm's exposure to a multiple of the fee, regardless of what the underlying advice produced. From the client's perspective, the protection is illusory: serious advice failures cost the entity many multiples of the fee.
The question that produces useful information: what is your professional indemnity cover level, and is your engagement-related risk covered or is the cover wider than the engagement? The answer separates firms that have taken the risk seriously from firms that haven't.
5. Can I speak to a previous client, unfiltered?
References on a proposal are curated. The named contact has been briefed in advance, the previous engagement was probably the firm's strongest piece of recent work, and the conversation produces a positive impression by design.
The harder question is whether the firm will introduce you to a previous client of comparable scale, in a comparable sector, without prior briefing of the contact. The conversation is then a private one between you and the previous client, with no script. Firms with consistent delivery quality are comfortable with this. Firms whose quality is uneven prefer the curated reference.
If you ask this question and the firm declines, the decline is itself the answer.
Asking the questions
Each of the five questions sounds harder to ask than it is. None is rude. None is unreasonable. They are the questions a procurement officer or a CIO would ask any other professional service provider whose work the entity will rely on. The reason they are rarely asked is that the procurement officer feels they are inappropriate when, in fact, they are diagnostic.
A practical practice: write the five questions into the bid clarification stage of the procurement event. The firms answer in writing as part of their bid response. The answers form part of the evaluation. The firms that answer well, in writing, on the record, are usually the firms that deliver well in practice. The correlation is not perfect but it is strong.
The five questions above reflect how Sgananda Group answers when asked them. We name our principals, we price a separate paid discovery, the Managing Director signs every deliverable, our PI cover is current, and our reference list is open. Readers may take the framework above and ask any firm, including ours.
