Describe a time when you suggested an unusual idea to a client.
This is a behavioral question that highlights a candidate's ability to perform outside-the-box thinking. IT business consultants are often hired to develop creative and innovative solutions and interviewers select candidates who are comfortable suggesting forward-thinking ideas.
Your example does not need to be generally unusual. The interviewer is concerned with how you present ideas that would seem unusual from the perspective of the client you pitch the idea to.
Avoid an answer that offers unusual suggestions that were not implemented or were not your own ideas. Also, avoid ideas that ultimately had a negative impact on your clients or led to confusion or rework.
"I worked with a lot of clients that were seniors and executives in the areas of accounting and finance, but a lot of the solutions I implemented were used by people in creative roles. From a business systems perspective, the main goals of my projects were to capture new data for reporting purposes, speed up data entry, or integrate disparate data sources. Many of my end users understood the need to track various points of data, but they often complained that they felt bored while using the systems.
It seemed foreign to the executives I worked with at the time, but I suggested that we work with a user experience expert to update the look and feel of our systems to match some of the most popular and enjoyable sites available to the public sector. They were hesitant to move forward but agreed to proceed with my idea to hire a usability expert. I ensured our sponsors that we would focus on easy to implement and scalable changes that add value to the data entry process in addition to the aesthetic changes we made. The end result was a repeatable template we used for a series of systems that everyone enjoyed using more because they were more intuitive, faster to use, and easy on the eyes."
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