• To Provide Clarity – the situation is confused, and you need expertise from a consultant to advise, help diagnose and clarify underlying causes, identify and evaluate options and suggest a course of action. You benefit from a better understanding of issues that could have significant impact on your business, as well as the neutrality and expertise of the consultant, so you can decide on any follow up action.
• To Design Solutions – the underlying business issue is known, but you are unsure about the solution – it needs to be designed. You benefit from a professionally and expertly designed solution to meet your needs. You also have clarity over the solution and the cost, timescale, and risk involved in implementation.
• To Implement Solutions – you have designed a solution to resolve a pressing issue, and you need to deploy this into operations. You benefit from expert deployment of the solution and having access to specialist skills, you also experience less disruption to operations and deliver a greater proportion of the potential benefits.
• To Acquire Skills – you are aware that your organisation needs to acquire a new or strengthened skills set. You benefit by having expert attention given to your staff’s training needs and in making use of a variety of approaches available to develop your staff.
• To Troubleshoot – you have a pressing problem or ‘fire’ that needs to be put out. You benefit by having experienced help with the issue, meaning it can be resolved faster and more effectively, as well as taking action that helps stop the problem recurring.

With care, you can also benefit by developing a longer-term relationship with a consultant. Over a number of engagements the consultant develops a sophisticated understanding of your business circumstances and needs, as well as good working relationships with staff from across your organisation. This allows the consultant to become extremely effective in delivering engagements. And there is also an incentive for the consultant to use its specialist skills and knowledge to identify new ways of improving your business – giving you access to a useful stream of ideas from an expert source, and the consultant access to further delivery projects. This symbiotic consulting role is called a trusted advisor and, provided the relationship remains in balance, it can deliver substantial value to your business.

Is it the Right Kind of Work for a Consultant?

Consultants are best used on engagements to improve your business or troubleshoot a problem.

If you want to help to run the day to day business you need a business process outsource provider or interim management agenct. Some consulting firms have service lines that can operate your processes for you, and if you decide to go that route you should be using a different contracting model for the outsourced process.

Is the Work Important Enough to be Addressed Now?

In our experience, consultants should be used to address issues that are important enough that they need to be dealt with now. Reasons for pressing work might include the need to meet  a regulatory requirement, the need to understand and solve a worrying issue affecting your business, the need to seize a market opportunity within an available time-window, speeding up part of an existing programme that is falling behind schedule, or carrying out an important change programme that you may not be able to staff.

Why? Well consultants still need your management time and direction, even if they are able to work largely unsupervised. And unless they are working on important issues they will find it difficult to get the input they need from you – and they will deliver a lower quality recommendation or product that you don’t have an incentive to use, they will take longer to complete their work because you won’t be available for them when they need your input, and effort will be wasted, as well as creating a distraction to other, more important, work underway.

Are There No Internal Resources to do the Work?

It only makes sense to use a consultant if you can’t locate a suitable internal resource.

Suitable is defined as – having the right skill set for the project, and being available to dedicate their time to the project (i.e. can be released from their day job for the duration of the project).

Consultants are particularly useful where organisations are lean, and don’t have many spare resources for project work or where organisations don’t have specialist project or technical skills on payroll.

‘Being available’ doesn’t count as a skill – we’ve seen many a team ill-equipped to carry out its responsibilities, which leads to wasted effort all round. Improvement or troubleshooting projects require specific skills, and you must make sure that these skills are included on the project team. If a member of staff is ‘free’ to be on the team, assess their capabilities and make sure that any lack of experience or skills shortfall is made up by adding complementary-skilled resources, and by targeted training and/or coaching.

Be aware also of part-time availability – say 2 days a week on the project, 3 days back at their desk. This usually translates into the resource doing their 5 day workload in these 3 days, impacting on the quality of their work, their commitment to the project, their work-home life balance, and their job satisfaction.

If the project is considered worthwhile enough to be run then why place it at significant risk of failure by not staffing it properly?

Do the Potential Benefits Justify the Cost?

The final question is about benefits and costs.

It does not make sense spending $100 to save $1. You should be aware of the magnitude of the problem being addressed in relation to the possible consulting fee to ensure the use of a consultant is proportionate in the circumstances.

In many cases you can’t put an exact figure on the issue. You can however estimate its likely range and determine if it is trivial, important or significant. And as you start work on resolving the issue this estimate can be progressively refined and tightened as your team understands more of the details involved.

You’ll also need to talk to your preferred consultant supplier (hopefully us) to get an idea of the scale of work needed and likely costs.

There can be a trap here – so make sure you understand the true magnitude of the problem – because what may a first seem small, after tracing its roots and consequences, may be risking business survival. (You might need to use a consultant to understand the magnitude of the problem in order to decide if it is worth while using a consultant to solve the problem. This is done all the time – and the justification for doing this would be that by using an expert you are reducing the risk that you’d missed something about the problem that made you classify it wrongly).

If you can answer all the above with a yes then you have a good case to use external consultants.

Coaching Mode

You should use coaching where you have an inexperienced team in charge of delivering a project.

We provide a coach to enable your team to work to the best of its ability, to learn new skills, and develop confidence in applying them.

Coaches ensure increased independence within the team, provide confidence to make decisions and recommendations, and reduce the team’s reliance on senior management direction.

Coaches can be a full-time member of the team, attend part time, or on an on-call basis.

We recommend our coach sets learning and development goals for your team, then after an initial intensive period of engagement, falls back to a part-time but regular schedule, with room for ad-hoc support when it is needed.

Training Mode

You should use training when you want your in-house team to carry out the project, but want them to strengthen their skills before or during the execution of the project.

We provide a learning-needs assessment, and construct individual learning plans for your team members.

We will endeavour to fit the learning plan to your stated constraints – e.g. limits on free study time, cost constraints on training courses, or preferred training modes.

The learning plan may contain a mix of on-the-job training, personal reading and reflection, as well as recommended formal courses (online or class based).

We can also develop and deliver customised training modules within this plan or help contract with external training providers we have used before.

Facilitation Mode

You should use facilitation when you want your in-house team to lead the project but feel you need additional support to carry out some of the team’s work.

Facilitation is useful where the entire team needs to make an important decision or design a solution – such as a strategic plan or a business case – and an external facilitator would provide a more neutral position to drive this part of the work forward.

It can also help a project team to work to a tight schedule by providing advice and helping prioritise or perform some of the team’s workload.

Facilitation is particularly effective with some elements of coaching added to the mix.

Support Mode

You should use support when you need additional team members to complement your in house team.

We provide support in terms of specialist difficult to source skills, and more generally to deliver part of your team’s workload under your direction.

Support resources help you manage the workload between those staff who need to concentrate on running the business, those dedicated to the project and those splitting their time between both.

We have had success providing support to project managers, providing change management resources, business case development, and focused process redesign.

Delivery Mode

You should use a delivery team when you don’t have the in-house skills or free resource needed to deliver an important project.

We provide a complete team to manage and professionally deliver a project on your behalf.

You may wish to attach members of your staff to the team to deliver part of the workload, or to develop their skills working within a professional team.

Delivery teams provide the focus needed to complete projects thoroughly, in rapid time.