Professional Services Most Important Question

Most Important Question to Ask When Hiring for Professional Services

Team Performive
by Team Performive on

When you are hiring a team or a freelancer to help augment your team’s skills, or get extra power for a project, what is the most important question to ask? They may have a great site and a list of technologies a mile long…

But do they dog food it?

That is right. Dog food.

Do they dog food it? It is an important question to ask when choosing a provider to help you with a project.

To dog food, used as a verb, means to use it yourself to solve similar processes. At Performive, the areas we specialize in, are truly specialization areas because we use the same tools, the same way in our own environment and platform that is the foundation for thousands of our clients.

For instance, our expert in-house engineers, the same ones that are available via our Devoted Engineering Services Program (that is our Professional Services Offering), use SaltStack to automate deployments (and other secret sauce operations) within our own environments. When a customer needs help within their own environment and is looking to hire a consultant or a specific skill like DevOps, it is important to know the expert you will be working with uses that skill on a daily basis.

Curious to see what Professional Services projects Performive has worked on? Download this DevOps with SaltStack Professional Services Case Study:

Most IT Pros get that. They may have gotten their certification in HTML – but does that mean they will be coding the entire site for their organization? In most cases, that is probably not a good idea. Your daily tasks are probably your strongest skills. So throw that coding project to the site developer and focus on advancing the company with your own specialized skill set.

When hiring Professional Services for a specific technology (referred to below as <technology>), ask these questions:

  • Who will I be working with?
  • What is their background?
  • Are they certified in <technology>?
  • Do they work with <technology> on a daily basis?
  • Do you dog food <technology> internally?

If you get to the last questions and the providers answers get hazy or they start to talk in circles, I advise seeking out another option – maybe Performive.