New Manager here: Need help to drive offshore team engagement
Hey y’all, I’m a new manager at a consulting firm that does ERP implementations, and I’m struggling with the reality of the role versus what I thought I signed up for.
I thought this was going to be a mostly billable consulting role. In practice, I’m also expected to lead the functional organization, mentor junior resources, support delivery, help win new work, manage client expectations, and keep projects moving. The issue is that leadership still seems to treat all of that as if it is not “real work.” It is just assumed that it can be squeezed in between billable hours.
The technical team is pretty well staffed, but the functional side is a different story. In ERP, functional work is not just knowing where buttons are. You need to understand accounting, inventory, order management, procurement, billing, revenue, projects, and how the business actually operates. It is hard to delegate that work if the people available do not have the depth, confidence, or initiative to own pieces of it.
Management keeps saying “use your resources,” but a lot of the resources are not really ready to be used without a ton of oversight. I have already suggested a skills matrix so I can understand who can handle what. I also started pushing the idea that each person should learn one new ERP area per quarter so we build coverage across the team. I’m trying to be constructive, but it feels like the gap is bigger than expected.
I thought it would improve after the first month, but last week I had to let someone go because they billed around 40 hours over the month and the output was basically a handful of Jira comments. That is the kind of thing I’m running into. Some people seem to want a steady backlog of work they can slowly chip away at, but consulting does not really work like that. Clients move fast, priorities change, and sometimes people need to be able to jump in, figure things out, and drive something forward.
The technical team seems to think they have the harder side covered, but a lot of their work is more structured and behind the scenes. Then functional gets pulled in to explain, validate, demo, and own the client-facing side of things after technical work has already been built. Sometimes it feels like we get a one-hour knowledge transfer and then we’re expected to make it all make sense to the client, even when the customization went ahead before the functional process was fully understood.
My question is: how do I get a functional team more engaged and willing to own work when the default response is basically “I don’t know how to do that”? I do not really have the ability to force people into it, and a lot of the work ends up coming full circle back to me anyway.
Has anyone dealt with this before? How do you build accountability and initiative on a functional ERP team without just becoming the person who has to clean everything up yourself?