Question 9

1. A major customer queue at Accenture can occur when a client already being serviced on one project is waiting for key resources to be freed for an upcoming project. Lets say BP has 5 Accenture Peoplesoft experts with deep oil industry and BP process knowledge. They may have another project requiring people with Peoplesoft skills, but have to wait for for the previous project to finish before those resources can be deployed to the new project. They would not want to switch to another consulting firm because those new resources would need to get familiarized with BP's organizational structure, systems, and processes.
2. Using Maister's psychological principles of waiting - Accenture could explain to BP that the quality of service they will receive by waiting will be higher than selecting another vendor to complete the service now. As I said before, training consultants from another company would take too long even if they were deployed quickly. Another method would be to help BP deal with the anxiety by creating a transition plan where for example, 2 of the resources work half-time on each project while the remaining 3 wrap up the previous project. This would also serve to turn the pre-process wait into an in-process wait. Essentially, a the project would not be fully kicked-off, but there would be some work being done. This technically means the process has been started, so the customer is now waiting in-process. Lastly, Accenture would communicate in clear timeline what the approximate wait time will be to deploy their people. This would give BP some certainty about the queue time.