Tony Karrer on LinkedIn and Web 2.0 for Management Consultants

Tony Karrer gave a Web 2.0 presentation in Los Angeles to an audience at the Institute of Management Consultants (unfortunately I was not able to attend having just learned about it that day).  He covers two aspects: serving clients and reaching prospects. Apparently, most of the interest was in the latter area, and as a summary of one of his theses, I reference the title of his blog post, "LinkedIn – Prospecting No – Conversation Yes : eLearning Technology".

For those looking for more info as it relates to consultants and LinkedIn, Ford Harding is one of the gurus I've looked to as a guiding light when I committed in early 2000ish to work at actively improving my sales and sales management IQ, particularly around professional services sales. Here's one of Ford Harding's posts on "Liking LinkedIn?". He has other posts regarding LinkedIn as well, so be sure to dig in and poke around if you have a chance.

An Example of Consulting Engagement Workstreams

The term "workstream" is often used in consulting, but offhand I cannot think about where it is defined for new consultants to reference. A workstream is not a fancy concept, yet it is an important construct that often has ties to consulting proposals, engagement management and division of labor, and processes used with the client. Note that not all consulting firms will characterize workstreams the same way that I describe them here, but I have found similar structures used in a number of consulting organizations that I have worked with.

What is a workstream, and where does it fit in the context of a consulting engagement? Let's start with the latter question first.

A consulting engagement is often framed around solving a specific problem statement for a client. In a prior post on articulating problems statements, I hinted that a consulting problem statement usually must be decomposed into smaller problems statements.

To answer these problems statements, the consultants usually need to put together a set of engagement activities that provide the frame for answering the overaching problem statement and subproblem statements. Engagement activities are often grouped together in coarse groupings often running in parallel. These coarse groupings are called "workstreams", and each workstream often has prime consultant and prime client point. The structure is pretty much in line with standard project management practices, but key adds from a consulting perspective are the problem statement and consultant-client touch points. See the figure below which has four workstreams covering strategy, technology, finance, and business plan development.

Consultingworkstreams 

As additional context, the problem statement for the above engagement was to help the client develop a business strategy and plan for entering the market as a new entrant in the wireless network and applications provider space. So as an example, the first (top) workstream is geared towards helping the client determine what business model and applications should be investigated in more detail by brainstorming on services and looking at the competitive envionment for plausible and defensible openings.

To close off this post, I think that it's important to note that the cadence and regular review structure with the client (e.g., see milestones at bottom of figure above relative to workstreams) are important processes. See my prior post illustrating why in consulting the process is an essential part of the deliverable. Readers may also want to refer to an earlier post I had on engagement managers (who own the entire set of workstream above) and the essence of management consulting.

Anecdotes on Consulting Versus Interim Management

Whether to use consultants versus interim managers can be a bit of a loaded topic, and I'll choose not to address every angle in one post. Here I will just scratch the surface and paint some color by relating some anecdotal experiences. Depending on interest level, I may follow-up this post with additional discussion at a broader level.

To set the context, here's a couple of working definitions that I'll offer up:

  • Consulting – use of a third-party (potentially a team) to help a company solve a particular business problem (for example, evaluate business opportunity for offering mobility applications to consumers, provide an independent assessment of a failing call center)
  • Interim Management – use of one or more experienced individuals to take or play the role of a manager or executive within the company (for a limited period of time or trial period).

Now my deeper attention to the term "interim management" first started when I worked back in the 90s at the management consulting firm, PRTM. As context for those not familiar with PRTM, I characterized PRTM (back then at least) as firm that balanced strategy and operations engagements. As such, the firm got involved with both early strategic planning and later-phase, tactical design of business capabilities. At risk of oversimplifying, PRTM consultants were not just pure strategy guys, but they were often people with actual implementation and management experience. There used to be a firm motto that floated around to the effect of, "Results, Not Reports". This motto was essentially a shot at strategy firm practices of delivering stacks of analyses and reports that never had an impact. One of the partners (who had just rolled off an assignment as interim CEO) described to me his view on interim management something to the effect as follows, "Interim management is something [infrequent] that the firm only does for special clients. Unless approached correctly interim management can create a dependency between the firm consultant and the client that is hard to wean the parties off of. But interim management can offer a variety of benefits, particularly when a company wants to move forward with operational execution immediately."

Since then, here's a few examples I've heard from clients over the years which are indicative of a lean more towards use of interim management over consulting approaches:

  • "We don't have the management skill set internally, and we need to fill three management roles in finance, services, and technology pretty immediately while introducing more sophisticated practices that can be transferred to the larger organization as we grow."
  • "We are exploring this new geography for our products and services, and we need someone to help us as a general executive (covering all entity and operational requirements) to see if we can get things to pan out."
  • "Our marketing VP will be going out on parental leave, and we need someone to fill the role for six- to nine-months."
  • "We need someone that can fulfill the corporate development function with total dedication, but we need the option to release this person once we have met the objective of securing a beachhead in the North America enterprise market."

Freelance Consulting

After March 3, I plan to leave my current gig to pursue freelance consulting for awhile, along with a number of colleagues. The exact vehicles and logistics are still in the formative phase – fortunately the administrative logistics for consulting businesses are not too arduous.

I find it useful to revisit a post I wrote a couple of years ago on independent consulting because I don't have the sales prospecting scale I use to have within a larger firm. I think that a lot of what I wrote about independent consulting is still true. I might have one additional add, and that is I think that social networking tools are getting better for helping consultants. Just the other day I was just contacted by a CEO of a technology company because of my LinkedIn profile and updates I had made to my status (which stated "Steve is looking for new contract or employment opportunities"). The CEO has been looking to grow his business and is looking for general management, finance, marketing, business development, and account management assistance. Although the lean was toward a full-time hire position for me, the geography is unlikely to work. So now the impetus is on me to work with him to determine whether I can help in either a consultative role or interim management role. Now in all fairness, the CEO knew me from before from venture-related circles and consulting, so this is not a cold networking opportunity. That said, I didn't have to reach out to him for the process to get kicked off. I was able to use social networking tools. And as compared to having to compete against 300-1000 applications for a job (I'm a normal guy and have *never* won in that kind of environment), one has to think about how to measurably change the odds of winning.

Of course, I've probably jinxed my personal opportunity by talking about it in the open. But given that we are in a terrible recession and that freelance consulting is the "new unemployment", I wanted to elevate the discussion.

Twitter Me This

Background: Management strategy consulting professional David Dalka, Florian Hollender, and other management consultants are using Twitter. Ford Harding, world-renowed author and expert on sales (e.g., for consultants and other professional services folks), also has two very recent posts on using LinkedIn and Twitter as part of the business development and sales process.

What else? Twitter raises more than $35 million (just before Valentine's Day) by the big guns in venture capital. Yet – no business model required.

Based on that context, I've started an account to get hands-on experience with Twitter. I think my home page is here. I can't stand to use instant messaging (although I do use it), so I'm not sure a federated "blurting"-thing is going to stick with me. That said, I'm willing to see whether carpal tunnel or Twitter wins out. I am also interested in developing my thoughts on both how Twitter communities form and how businesses might capitalize on Twitter.

Update (2/24/09): Link to approximately 8,414 consultants that Twitter? Side note: compare this to approximately ~1.2 million consultants on LinkedIn.

Some Tips On Dressing As A Consultant

Florian Hollender at the Killer Consultant blog has some good Consulting 101 tips on how to shop for clothes when starting as a new consultant. I've never really commented on dress considerations publicly, but I'll add just one recommendation on dress based on personal experience:

Plan to wear a pair of decent shoes on the plane, and don't just pack dress shoes in your baggage. 

I have had to let my boss wear my shoes to a client site when his got lost during international travel. Since he took the nice-looking ones, good thing I wasn't left to wearing a bunch of sneakers to the client site!

Good Find and Thoughts on Management Consulting and Recruiting in 2009

Gautam Ghosh has both a good find and interesting comments on management consulting recruiting in the current environment. A few themes permeate his post: 1)laser-specific recruiting, 2) hybrid experience, and 3) focus on productivity. I can't really comment on #1, but as for #2, I have known a number of ex-consultants return to their prior consulting firms after having left once for operating companies (in some cases, the returns have been even more numerous than once). For whatever reason, returning to your prior firm (or even to the consulting field again for that matter) used to be much more rare. On #3 regarding productivity experience, this has been confirmed by account executives that I work in conjunction with – the turndown in the global economy has really created a stronger demand for those with operations or cost reduction experience (over other areas such as growth managers).

Update 2/20/09: An older post of mine that may be interesting to reflect on in a down market … "Don't Become An 80s Rock Drummer"

Quick Graph on Triangulation Concept

Awhile back I had a post on triangulation, and although I had received a number of questions on how this might be depicted, I never got around to showing it. The attached picture below is pretty good and is motivated by an engagement involving wireless spectrum valuation. The basic idea is that we used three methods to get the range of potential dollar values for each wireless spectrum property. The chart below is the summary chart that ties the results of separate analyses together. The first method of valuation on the left (historic comparables) involved looking at past government auctions for similar properties and coming up with high, low, and in-between values. The second method of valuation (economic model) used a statistical regression model trained on a priori auction conditions (e.g., number of bidders, amount of money ante) and ex-post results (e.g., property values), and here we basically used the model to predict what might be the outcome of a new, unseen auction. The third model (financial metrics) basically took a look at recent market transactions (e.g., outright asset sales) or values imputed by the stock market value of wireless-heavy companies (e.g., by taking enterprise value and normalizing by spectrum holding amount).
Triangulation  

When one plots these three different valuation methods on the same chart, it becomes possible to "triangulate" and see what a competitive values for the wireless properties might be. We basically added two horizontal lines to depict the expected minimum amount of money to pay to be in the game and also the maximum amount of money that should be spent (e.g., based on balance sheet of company and financial capacity).

Update 7/30/09: Been made aware of another posting on the net regarding triangulation and the football field method. See here.