We’re evaluating consulting firms in support of a multi-million dollar major systems implementation. We had a second round of interviews with one of the firms, and asked for some examples of functional and technical specification/scope documents they’ve produced before.
Just received them. They were done in MS Word, and the techies were very careful to Find-Replace all instances of the company name the document was originally done for, as well as the various folks on approvals lists, etc. Nice and generic and secure.
Except, of course (and anyone who’s in Security or who’s done much of this sort of stuff can predict what I’m going to tell you), it was all done with Track Changes on, and they never then went through and did an Accept Changes. So when the document was opened by me, in “Final with Markups” mode, all the changes were there, including all the names that were deleted/changed.
Oops.
Granted, I’ve seen other technical types that should have known better (as well as senior IT managers and CIOs) do exactly the same thing, but, damn, doesn’t make me feel at all warm and fuzzy about trusting my project (and my company’s proprietary info) to them.
A word to the wise …
Did they leave in the financial information from their last negotiated deal? =)
Alas, it was a technical document. That would have been pretty cool, though …
Interesting, the parallels between this post and the last one.