Consulting and training: how did the basic TDRS products evolve? - totalparticipation.com

I remember that when I got my very first client, Wawel, I analyzed the entire Polish confectionery industry. The offer I prepared was really good and everyone at the company seemed to be really impressed. Well, there was maybe one small detail - I learned that the company I was supposed to work for wasn't actually the confectionery firm, it was the Wawel Royal Castle. It was 1992. Since then, the market has evolved. I've noticed an interesting trend - the training sector was developing really fast. Everyone wanted to be a trainer, but noone actually offerede anything after that, there was no analysis of the initial state of the company nor the implementation of the solutions. This is how the offer of Stocki Associates was created.

For the first couple of years we were focused mainly on trainings. This was a bit frustrating, as usually when we met with the group we found out that they needed something entirely different from what we were suppose to give them. To make things worse, no one wanted to have a decent training needs analysis. Right now I am fully convinced that it is better to do a good diagnosis and save money on training than the other way round. It is very common for organizations to have a number of people who would do very good at conducting trainings. On the other hand, the diagnosis process requires a kind of outsider view on the organization. Let's give an example. We want to conduct a customer service training for sales representatives. How do we know what they need if we don't ask the customers about their basic shortcomings? In order to conduct such training in the responsible manner we have to do a decent customer satisfaction research. Having a report like that in our pockets, we won't have any problems with designing a training program or better yet a full sales strategy.

But immediately after we introduced diagnosis as part of our product portfolio, our clients started to complain that we leave them with the hardest part of the process. This is why we were virtually forced to offer transition consulting, which later evolved into total participation consulting and OpenProfIT for IT companies.

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