How to Say No and Yes at the Same time to the Customer

A few years ago, I went to one big customer to do System Audit. The Customer outsourced the support of ERP to a few vendors. She wanted me to review the entire process and provide the recommendations for Improvement. I reviewed the Support where I found there are many legacy applications with no documentation and the support consultants have the entire knowledge. The Support consultants fix the issues without revealing how are they fixed The Support consultants run the monopoly as no one else has the knowledge The attempts to transition the knowledge to the Customer org were failed Consultants don't have any succession plans. for every role there is one and only one consultant. If the consultant is out for any reason the work is staled No Consultant does two roles. If asked, the Consultant will try to add another consultant to do that job I did the review and submitted the report with some suggestions such as Introduce ticketing tool to formally store all issues logged. Even freeware could be a good starting point The Tcket is not closed unless the User approves at the end The Support engineer has to fill the Solution Template with all relevant details in the template to submit the ticket for closure The metrics include howmany duplicate tickets and similar ticets are logged. this impacts the Support performance ratings 5. ... The customer was just fine with the report and she revealed that she actually wanted to terminate a few people and asked me to include those names in the report. It is not professionally correct to get to that level of extent in Customer organization. Hence I suggested her an approach. 1. Do a reorganization for Support Unit 2. Reorganize in such a way that the roles will be restricted to the number that she wanted to retain 3. Prepare the Role description and rationale to qualify for each of the role 4. Once the teams are accommodated in the roles the rest will be job less Customer was happy and thanked me. I thanked the god as I escaped from great embarrassment.

Disclaimer: I have been writing the blogs in the style of story telling based on real incidents but with some fiction added to emphasize the message. Hence I request not to make any conclusions to derive facts based on the posts in these articlesa