Chapter 8: Operating a Consultancy Project


A former colleague once explained his view of consultancy thus: 'We are in the business of selling people their dreams', he said. 'Consultants are the dream merchants of business.' This may be the case, but dreams turn into nightmares when consultants promise the unattainable to a client. At best they will have a damaged reputation; in these increasingly litigious times, they may end up being sued.

All that a client buys on purchasing an assignment is a promise; unlike, for example, a car salesperson, a consultant cannot point to the product and say, 'This is what you're going to get.' What you actually get depends on the skills of the consultants delivering the project. In this chapter we consider first the way in which consultancy projects are structured and the skills applying to each phase. Second, we review the demands that consultancy projects make in respect of project management.

THE STRUCTURE OF A CONSULTANCY PROJECT

Irrespective of the level of intervention or the number of phases in a consultancy project, however, you will find that this structure of a project will be similar. The structure of a consultancy project can be broken down into the major stages as shown in Figure 8.1.

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Figure 8.1: The structure of a consultancy project

Entry

Your first contact with a client may be in selling an assignment or starting an assignment that has already been sold. In either case, careful preparation is required and you should aim to make a favourable impact: there is no second chance to make a first impression.

Early in any project it is important to allow time for familiarization. This will be necessary not only for practical matters (such as who's who, office layout etc) but also for understanding the informal rules and climate of the organization. This I call a 'wallow'; it is unstructured data collection, which allows you to soak up the atmosphere and culture of an organization, to learn its 'language' and the myriad of other features that characterize it.

The skills of entry have been covered in Chapter 5 on selling: when consultants meet new clients, they are 'selling' themselves in this role. No further remarks on this are given here.

Contracting

Contracting is about having shared expectations between client and consultant as to what is involved in the project. Selling consultancy is very much a process of product design as well as persuading a client to purchase your services. It is therefore essential to be clear what exactly you are selling, and the specification can be best encompassed in terms of reference dealt with in detail in the sections below.

As soon as contact is made there will be expectations created and commitments made on both sides. These are in addition to the formal agreement set out in the terms of reference. Expectations relate not only to meeting commitments in the terms of reference, but also in how you carry out the project, for example, the apparent priority you attach to the work you are doing for the client. You will also have expectations of the client; these will be reflected largely in the commitment the client shows towards the project.

The sponsor - the member of the client's staff commissioning the project - will, presumably, be committed to it, but you have to consider the commitment of others. Will the project require the cooperation of more senior or more junior staff and, if so, are they committed to the project? Beware of sponsors who are not committed to the project or (at the opposite extreme) who are carrying it out as a personal crusade.

Contracting also covers the practicalities at the start of a project:

  • Where will you be working and with what facilities?

  • What is the project plan (if this has not been included in the terms of reference)?

  • What support will you receive from the client and what form will this take?

  • Who will you be dealing with among client staff?

  • What have client staff been told about the project - what are their expectations?

Diagnosis

Diagnosis consists of data collection, its analysis and then diagnosis. Paradoxically, you need to consider analysis before deciding what data you need to gather; you have to know what you are going to do with it when you have it. Data gathering is time-consuming and you need to make sure you confine yourself to gathering only that which is necessary and sufficient for your purposes. (See Chapter 6.)

The diagnosis should be drawn from the data collected and consists of conclusions about the nature of the problems being addressed and how they might be resolved. Conclusions answer the question, 'What is the relevance of this data to the areas of concern we are examining?'

Intervention

As a result of the diagnosis, you can then specify the intervention that needs to be made. Because consultants rarely have executive authority within their clients, most often the intervention specified will be in the form of recommendations to be adopted by the client. Whether or not recommendations are accepted is, at least in part, dependent on the influence of the consultant. This topic is discussed later in this chapter.

Closure

When you leave the client, they should have an ongoing capability to maintain the changes and improvements you have introduced as a result of your work. Transfer is the process of doing this, and is discussed further at the end of the chapter. It is also important to carry out some sort of evaluation of the assignment once it has been completed. This is important not only for quality assurance purposes, but also to ensure that the consultancy practice gets value from the experience of the consultancy team who have carried out the job, for example by capturing:

  • the experience of having carried out this work;

  • any new operating techniques that have been developed during the project;

  • the experience and credibility of working in a particular business sector.

Finally there is disengagement. The end of the project may mean the end of this particular piece of work, but there may be extension work, that is, other projects you can carry out to the benefit of the client, or the continuation of the existing project to further levels. Anyhow, the experience of having worked together will have effected a change in the relationship between consultant and client, which should provide a good basis for further work in the future.




The Top Consultant. Developing Your Skills for Greater Effectiveness
The Top Consultant: Developing your Skills for Greater Effectiveness
ISBN: 0749442530
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 89

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