Category: Management Consulting

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How To Make Project Closure and Client-Consultant Transitions Smooth

Eventually projects with consultants come to an end. Similar to completion of a good run as an employee of a firm, feelings at the end of a consulting project can be bittersweet. For me, the sweetness of successfully completing a project feels great, while the end of the day-to-day, close working relationship with the client can make one reflect for a moment longer.

Over the years through consulting mentors, peers, and personal experience, I’ve learned of some tricks to making transitions smoother for both clients and consultants. Here are some:

  • Clients and consultants should develop a mutual understanding of how the relationship will eventually end in terms of time of transition. While we don’t need pre-nuptials, recognize that relationship communication is a two-way street. Some consulting partners explicitly discuss with client executives the notion of gradually winding down longer-term relationships over periods of months (versus days or weeks) so that business and operational needs are met.
  • The mutual understanding of project duration with clients and consultants may be specified in terms of project phases. Using product development lifecycle terms, the two parties may define a relationship scope to be around early phases such as ideation, planning, design, development, & incubation versus ongoing management. A twist on this may be identifying the strategic roadmap, blue sky, whiteboard areas, etc. that the client will work on regardless of consultant involvement (and then picking where the consultant will work). Once the areas are complete, the client-consultant relationship will end.
  • Support the transition process with documentation, project closeout meetings, and the like. These are basic project management fundamentals, and in the cases where project boundaries may be less clear (e.g., due to a long-term relationship with a client), having tangible outputs and meeting points can help parties to transition.
  • In cases of certain strategic initiative, interim management, and special-situation consulting arrangements, transition success can be measured by how effective permanent hires are onboarded. The tactical transitions can include the consultant helping with securing new financial budgets for an organization, providing knowledge transfer of strategy and planning efforts, shadowing new hire efforts, and helping to build out the initial ongoing processes.

Finally, celebrate both the relationships built and advances made together. This is where marriage and the client-consultant relationship analogy works better – hard work makes the bond stronger. And your “ex” may actually refer you in this case.

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Special Discussion on Starting Consulting Services Organizations Within Product Companies

When people think about consultants, they often think about those that work for companies like McKinsey, Accenture, Deloitte, etc. These are companies that are essentially independent from product vendors. However, there are a number of companies that provide consulting or professional services as part of product companies (e.g., companies like Cisco, Avaya, Nortel, Ericsson, IBM) that may sell things like hardware or software. I’ve had the opportunity to incubate and/or reboot the management, sales, marketing, and delivery for a number of these types of consulting practices, and they definitely face a number of issues that are unique from independent consulting firms.

As an example of a jumpstart “Consulting Services for Product Company” engagement, I have often found four common failure points to look out for when examining the organization from an end-to-end view from strategy through sales and delivery (see figure below which hints at the sales learning curve an organization must work through). The failure points are:

  • Unclear, strategy for providing consulting services – An example of unclear strategy includes not being able to articulate to what extent consulting services should be designed to protect product lines versus providing a new revenue stream. Also, what are the types of consulting services to be provided (the services portfolio)?
  • Unclear method for getting leads into the pipeline – Depending on strategy, consulting services organizations within product companies are often implemented as overlay organizations, and as such, the process of getting in front of customers and managing prospects can lack proper definition, discipline, and support tools. Often the buyer in the organization is different too.
  • Improper tone for sales meetings – Product companies are often used to marketing-push type sales strategies (e.g., “here’s the benefit and features of our product – its the best”). On the other hand, consulting services sales are often more diagnosis, empathy, and solution-driven. Getting the right mix between product and services messaging takes some work.
  • Irregular quality of consulting services project delivery – In some cases, consulting services may be may be provided as an afterthought or on a “free” basis to customers (e.g., subsidized by product sales). Unfortunately, a customer’s time is money, so even if the service cost is covered elsewhere, the consulting organization still needs to provide quality work to the customer.

Implementing consulting organizations within product companies can be a great opportunity. That said, I’ve provided a peek at some of the hazards involved. What has your experience been with consulting and professional services organizations within product companies?

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Business Development Chronicles – The Story of Us (Doesn’t Have to End in Tragedy)

It’s a tale of Big Company and Small Company.

Big Company likes Small Company’s:

  • focus and style
  • entrepreneurial attitude and skills.

Small Company likes Big Company’s:

  • scale of resources
  • scope and number of customers.

Big Company hates thing like:

  • getting embarrassed by Small Company in front of customers
  • getting burned and stuck with Small Company’s software source code
  • worrying about loose cannons in Small Company’s organization
  • working with Small Company’s legal paper.

Small Company hates things like:

  • working with Big Company’s cumbersome processes
  • getting whipped round navigating Big Company’s large organization and jumping through hoops
  • waiting for the whale to speed up
  • failing to get real deals cut
  • getting RFIs from Big Company and worrying whether Big Company is playing around with others
  • answering the RFI question about financial stability of Small Company
  • getting paid six months late by Big Company.

The Story of Us doesn’t have to end in tragedy. “Us” requires hard work, like courtship. It requires an honest assessment of values and one another’s strengths and weaknesses. It requires regular communication. It requires bridge building skills on fluctuating ground, and should be viewed as an opportunity for those up to the challenge.

Endnotes:                                                                                                     

  • Business Development is about new initiatives and incubation
  • The percentage of alliance failures cited often exceeds 60 percent (example Entrepreneur article).
  • The title for this post was inspired by Taylor Swift’s song, The Story of Us from the Speak Now album
  • I wrote this post reflecting upon doing consulting & contract business development activities and representing mega, mid-market, and small companies over the past year.
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What I’ve Learned From Buyers of Management Consulting Services

Many blog posts and articles address when to use management consultants versus not. Some argue that using consultants for strategy development intimate incompetence by management (example here). Others argue that consultants should be used in cases when expertise is higher than that of existing employees.

Companies should definitely examine the needs and tradeoffs for using management consultants. Tradeoffs include expertise, background in similar projects, knowledge retention, cash outlay, incentives, organizational dependency issues, etc.

But I’ve learned something entrepreneurial from a number of buyers that deeply understand how to use consultants and how to lead:

Many smart buyers of management consulting services focus on making forward progress. They focus on solving problems. Whether using consultants is the cheapest option or the best discount of future profits that a client has ever seen or anywhere in-between – the choice of whether to use consultants is less relevant than getting things done with a positive return.

As a long-time consultant, I am clearly somewhat biased. But I’ve been on the buyer side for consulting services too. My main point is to encourage folks to spend a balanced amount of time focusing on how to solve a problem as opposed to pointing fingers.

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Facilitation Technique: “Painting the Ends of the Spectrum”

While I don’t often write about leadership, management, and consulting “techniques”, there’s one that I wanted to share as I’ve found it useful when facilitating a diverse group of folks. I call it “painting the ends of the spectrum”, although I’m sure there other varieties and names for this approach.

Here are a couple of examples of “painting the ends of the spectrum”:

  • Trying to hone in on a direction related to strategy – In discussions with a client, framing the discussion by saying something to the effect of, “On the one spectrum, we can focus on simply reviewing the documents to make sure all parties understand. This will require a fairly short period of time. On the other end of the spectrum, we can work towards developing a common solution. Such an approach will require more time and strategy planning on our end.” This can be followed up by either the question, “Where on the spectrum are thinking we should be aiming for?” Alternatively depending on the bias you feel acceptable for the situation, you may indicate, “I think the former end of the spectrum is preferable. That said, what do you think?”
  • Attempting to gauge direction on customer preference – The technique can often be used in primary market research or sales situations. Here you may ask, “On the one end of the spectrum you can have a solution that covers X, Y, and Z, and will meet your end needs (for a premium fee) of being able to sleep at night. On the other end of the spectrum, you can have a narrower solution that has smaller out-of-pocket fees and may require greater coordination and integration on your part. Which direction do you prefer and why?”

Painting the ends of the spectrum works in many situations, particularly if complexity is somewhat linear (i.e., moving from simple to complex). In some cases, you may find it useful to paint other colors in the middle of the spectrum too. I tend to find that this latter situation works more in written or visual presentations.

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Q&A On Management Consulting and Leadership Topics (On Quora)

For those unfamiliar with Quora, it is one of the emerging “question and answer” sites on the Internet. Although its positioning is not quite clear to me yet, a point of difference relative to other sites (like Yahoo Answers) is that Quora integrates aspects of social networking technology. Throw in a carefully-honed, early-adopter market segment and some venture capital hype – the result for now seems to be a high-quality, professional dialogue hub.

In any case, I thought I’d share some answers I’ve provided to several management consulting and leadership questions posed on the site:

Let me know what you think. Thanks!

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The Power of Project-Based Thinking

As a consultant, 2010 has been an interesting year for me to reflect upon. I am thankful for the clients I have, and they have challenged me to perform my best in a very diverse set of circumstances and industries over the past couple of years.

What was particularly interesting this year was the mixture of smaller, project-based clients versus clients that had more of a retainer-based model engagement structure with me. These bookend engagement structures have different tradeoffs, and one thing that I developed an even deeper appreciation for was the ability to take a “project-based” perspective to either engagement structure.

Although I’m going to leave out an explicit definition of project-based thinking to provoke thought, for me here are some of the benefits I have seen:

  • Since project life can end at any moment, fewer things are taken for granted
  • Agile performance necessitates optimizing the communication and analysis organizational structures
  • There is an increased focus on output and measureable results
  • A focus on output in turn requires decisions to be made more quickly
  • Excess capacity or process inefficiencies become more readily exposed
  • A need for quicker decisions increases the need for management to articulate strategic tradeoffs more crisply
  • There are often concrete efforts to balance benefits (e.g., revenue) against costs (e.g., expenses) and investment levels
  • The goal of driving through a project can help break through barriers and challenge inertia often systemitized by a “corporate structure”
  • A focus on project goals can help bring out the best leadership qualities of the project team.

What are your thoughts? To what extent can consultants, contractors, and employees be engaged with a project-based approach?

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A Peek At The Difficulties of Incubating New Initiatives Within Large Companies

Entrepreneurial situations in large companies differ from that of startups, yet one thing that they seem to share is that they often represent “hope” in one way or another. In the case of large corporations, these new initiatives can not only turn out to be profitable “ventures” but also boost morale and reward key employees through growth opportunities. Yet many of these new initiatives have difficulty getting off the ground. Frustration is common. This post provides a peek at some of the situations, complexities, and steps to resolution that I have seen.

First, here’s a picture of a common situation in a large company faced with the prospect of starting a new initiative or business line:

  • Perceivably significant yet amorphous business opportunity
  • No money committed / no budget
  • No or limited organizational resources
  • Established products and sales & marketing channels
  • Mature and complex business and product approval processes.

What adds a level of complexity to the situation (and sometimes leads to insanity for those working directly within the environment) is that:

  • Venture requires substantial investment to ultimately succeed
  • Finance cycle of start-up opportunities (opportunity timing) does not align well with the long, finance planning cycles of large companies (sometimes can be 14+ month delays!)
  • Star players in the current organization have limited availability for the new organization
  • Articulating and aligning on a business opportunity requires collaboration by many functions, and these functions are separate and overloaded in the current organization
  • Sales and product development processes often need to be understood at more than the surface-level.

Here are some ideas for addressing many of the above issues:

  • Recognize that it’s not usually possible or desirable to speed up the process by cutting corners
  • Break the process into smaller pieces to get rolling
  • Search for the right sponsor and core team
  • Secure a portion of time for each of the star players
  • Give the employees a real chance to make things work 
  • Consider getting a commitment for small amount of money to get rolling
  • Start to articulate what the business opportunity looks like and document it
  • Consider using a facilitator that can pull the pieces together, help layout program plan, and frame strategic issues and options
  • Paint the vision for the org structure and build emotional attachment to the cause
  • Involve those from sales and product development that will be eager to provide input and testing grounds
  • Aim for pioneer sales and business development deals with lighthouse accounts (concrete wins)
  • Rinse, refine, increase committment, and repeat.

It may take a leap of faith to get things started. But the leap of faith can be smaller than the temptation of the opportunity as a whole. Sometimes the keys are to look for forward motion and to take some initial steps as opposed to wanting to knock it out of the park too soon.

Let me know your thoughts and experiences!

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