Bob Brown's Consulting Intelligence Briefings

I've Joined the Carnival!

This week’s edition of Carnival of the Capitalists -- a blog carnival -- is being hosted on the blog of world-renowned professional services guru David Maister.

Here’s a photo of David and I taken during lunch at the 2006 Consulting Summit last November in New York. It’s easy to tell us apart – David’s the really smart one.

For a peek at some of the thoughts of bloggers you may not be familiar with, I recommend you head over to David’s blog and look around. In his “Carnival” post he’s organized links to interesting posts on more than 50 different business and professional services blogs – all neatly organized by subject.

Oh, and about the joining the carnival title?

David was kind enough to include one of my posts from this blog. I’m flattered.

Consultant Satisfaction Survey Closing This Weekend

Our current survey – The 2007 Consulting Satisfaction Survey – will be closed to input as of 11:59 PM on Sunday evening, January 21. This is 2 days later than originally announced and is being done to allow the maximum number of responses on this important topic.

The variety of the responses has been very interesting [we can view responses prior to the closing of the survey] and will add to our store of knowledge about the wants and needs of clients of consultants.

If you’ve dealt or worked with consultants in 2006 and haven’t taken the survey, please take notice. The final hour is fast approaching. Share your experiences with consultants – both good and bad -- and help improve the quality of the outcomes of future consultant-involved projects.

Client’s Fault or Consultant’s Fault?

The following comment came across my desk this morning. It was in response to a question on our current survey about plans to use – or not to use – a particular consultant again. The person taking the survey [name, company and location is being withheld] indicated they would NOT be using the consultants again.

When asked, ‘Why?”, they responded,

“They knew their product, but remained entirely dependent upon our company's project team for any attempt at understanding the business. So - the project team was made up of one or two of our IT staff, one or two key employees from the business areas involved, and the consultants who knew the product. What was missing was a true business analyst. Essentially we had a team of 'order takers' but nobody trying to understand and guide us as to where we should be going. As a result, our project has taken 2 years longer than originally planned (and we are not live yet.) We are implementing a configured system to accommodate evey [sic] little twist and turn in our business rules. We should have done a process re-engineering before implementing.”

So, who’s at fault? Without knowing all the details, I'm inclined to say that both parties – the client and the consultant – were at fault.

The client apparently didn’t do their homework. They didn’t understand what was involved in implementing this system and clearly didn’t understand that it would have been appropriate to reengineer those business processes before attempting to put in the new system. (Anyone else think it might have been an ERP or CRM system?)

Based on the way the comment reads, the consultants were either a captive implementation group or were independent and very familiar with that specific product. The issue of paving the cow path is not a new phenomena. That they didn’t INSIST and REQUIRE that their client first do the required front end work tells me they were more concerned with their billings than the well being of their client.

Looks like both parties were at fault. And it also looks like the consultants were engaging in patently unethical behavior.

Comments?

Warm and toasty consulting secrets

Over in Belfast, an imaginative fellow named Peter Kerr, who runs a design firm by the name of Atto, Ltd., has developed an intriguing way to raise money for charity. His innovative web site, Your Name on Toast, is racking up the hits and the donations to charities to be named later – based on voting by the donors.

These kinds of web site, which Seth Godin refers to as “link promo pages,” are a great way for individuals and organizations whose web sites aren’t in the top 1,000 to get some additional exposure. In this case, each piece of toast links to a web site specified by the person who makes a donation.

Peter’s new web site just happened to coincide with the introduction of our new “consulting secrets” marketing campaign. The result is that we’re one of the contributors.

Results? Our web traffic is way up. Now more people know more about the types of specialized services -- including troubled project resolution -- that are available from Consulting Intelligence.

The 2006 Consulting Attitudes Survey

Over on the Consulting Intelligence web site, we’ve just released our latest survey. If you’ve worked with external consultants in 2006, we’d like to hear from you.

Our latest survey deals with the experiences and perceptions of clients that have recently worked with external consultants. For example, we ask how well their consultants performed. We also ask for their opinion on the primary benefits to be gained -- and risks to be concerned about – when they consider dealing with external consultants.

We also give them an opportunity to rank order how they feel about consultants as compared to other professions.

The online survey can be completed in less than 20 minutes. Click here to take the survey.

For those of you that choose to leave your name and email address during the online survey process, we’ll be happy to send out a summary of the survey results at no charge.

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales’ Puerile Hat Trick

Last night (Thursday, November 9th) in accepting an award in Tampa, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame managed to publicly demonstrate: 1) his naiveté; 2) his overblown self importance; and 3) his extraordinarily bad manners. Actually it wasn’t so much what he said during the acceptance speech he gave but what he said to a reporter from The St. Petersburg Times who interviewed him for an article about his award.

The occasion was the Tampa Bay Technology Forum’s third annual industry achievement awards gala. [Full disclosure: Consulting Intelligence is a member of TBTF and I was at the function with a number of CI’s employees.]

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the organization, TBTF is a regional professional association of technology and business leaders, investors, government, researchers and educators dedicated to growing and promoting Tampa Bay's technology “eco-system.” As is their custom at these events, TBTF honored the year's most significant achievements of business and technology professionals in the Bay area in a number of categories, including: Technology Professional Leader of the Year; Emerging Technology Company of the Year and Entrepreneurial Leader of the Year.

In addition, this year they decided to present a special, first time award for Visionary Achievement. Yep, it seems that St. Petersburg’s own Jimmy Wales was to be the first honoree. Apparently he was notiified and agreed to attend and accept the award.

Based on what the told the Times, one might think Jimmy believes everything he reads in the paper. Case in point was the article that appeared in The Tampa Tribune earlier in the week. It must be great to be great!

The bottom line is that if you do show up to accept an award you don’t malign the folks who are giving it to you. Perhaps hanging around with Bono and the Hollywood crowd has led Jimmy to believe he can behave as they do with their disingenuous and politically laden acceptance speeches at the Golden Globes and Oscar award ceremonies.

Jimmy, what follows is a bit of advice. If you do agree to accept an award, stand up, smile, be nice, say thank you and then sit down. If you can’t handle that, don’t bother showing up.

And finally, if you need help in buying a tux, give me a call. I’ll post a note to my readers and possibly we can all chip in to help you out.

Is Your Consultant a Seer or a Peer -- or Worse?

It all depends on the evaluation criteria you developed to select the consultant.

As part of selecting a consultant to address your issue or problem, best practice dictates that you carefully define your evaluation criteria. Understanding the kinds of experience and the specific skills and competencies you’ll need in an advisor is not a trivial matter.

First, you have to be confident that you and your team have actually isolated the root issue or problem to be addressed. You know that’s important because you’ve all heard the yada yada blah blah about solving solutions instead of problems.

Especially in those cases with the potential for a significant impact on your organization, we recommend a non-traditional, but very effective, approach.

We feel that in the long run it’s often more effective – and sometimes even cheaper – to first hire a consultant to define the issue or problem. Once you all agree that the root issue or problem has been uncovered, have that same consultant help you develop the evaluation criteria for a consultant to actually resolve the issue or problem. And, no, the first consultant can’t be considered a candidate for the next job. This keeps everyone honest.

And yes, you still have to develop the evaluation criteria for the first consultant. And no, this isn’t supposed to be one of those Carch-22 type of things. Being a proactive client isn’t the easiest job on earth.

Remember, if things were really easy, any under-educated doofus that flips burgers for minimum wage could be sitting in your plush seat instead of having to stand all day. And where would that leave you?

Satisfied But Not Well Served?

A friend of mine has a small service company. He recently switched to a new firm to handle his email accounts.

He had been using the firm that designed and hosted his web site to also handle his email. As his firm grew, he found that their procedures and charges for handling an increasing number of email accounts weren’t competitive with the larger companies that specialize in volume.

So, while he kept his web site with the original design and hosting firm -- because he was very happy with their service -- he moved the management and administration of his email accounts to another firm. After the change had taken effect, he noticed something strange. The amount of spam email he and his employees received decreased by over 90 percent!

The firm he had dealt with for years -- and with which he was very satisfied -- had not been doing a very good job of keeping spam out of his email in baskets. If he hadn't switched providers, he would have never known things could be better.

The first lesson here is that it often pays to investigate options. This isn't just about email. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal stated that many people were “very satisfied” by the services provided by their physicians. But, an independent medical review of the quality of services provided to those people showed that the specific treatments they received had not been consistent with best practices.

The second – and more important lesson – is that just because you’re satisfied, even very satisfied, doesn’t mean you're being well served.

Back Online

After a very busy and interesting month of September, I’m back at my desk – at least until next week – in sunny Florida. During the month, I had the opportunity to work with a fascinating client whose ongoing relations with the consultants brought in to help her firm on a very important corporate project had rapidly deteriorated. The resulting ill will on both sides had presented her with some real challenges.

We don’t divulge client information publicly, so I’m not going to name names (of the client or of the consultants involved) but I can tell you that both the client and the consultants, who she eventually decided to continue working with, now have a common view of the important client issues to be resolved and the "rules of engagement" that are to be followed. We’ll continue to monitor the situation, but things are looking like they’re back on track.

You may have also notice that since my last post we’ve cleaned up the look and feel of the blog. The long listing of categories (formerly at the top of the right sidebar) was confusing to new readers who arrived at the blog as a result of a search and actually hindered their navigation of the site. At the same time, TypePad was introducing the ability to easily include Technorati tags for all posts. That made the decision to eliminate our own individual tag categories – except for Main – very easy. Now our posts are easier to locate -- and even read -- on Technorati. Of course you can also subscribe via RSS.

In the place formerly occupied by that long category list we’ve moved the MORE INFORMATION section which includes a link to the Consulting Intelligence web site.

I’m glad to be back and looking forward to sharing some more ideas on how to get the best possible results from your consultants and other professional services vendors.

The Post Engagement Review

One of the more valuable exercises that a client of professional services firms can do is to proactively coordinate a post project or post engagement review.

The effort is – assuming you plan on staying in business and adapting to constantly changing times – usually well worth the time and expense. The results are added to your knowledge base, enabling you to be better prepared next time you need to bring in external consultants or other professional services providers.

First, what’s involved? It’s more than one meeting. Done correctly, it’s a process. The post engagement review involves a number of steps:

1. Have your internal team hold the first meeting prior to the conclusion of the engagement. Do not invite the consultants. Don’t even tell them you’re having the meeting. Review all the previously collected work products and artifacts that have been generated during the engagement. Define the subjects that need to be covered and the issues to be addressed in a subsequent joint review session that the consultants will attend. Document the results and use them as input to the agenda of the joint meeting.

2. Coordinate with your consultants and schedule an engagement review with the combined team of client and consultant personnel. Have the consultants draft the initial agenda. Then add any agenda items you want included. Hold the meeting immediately after the final engagement deliverable has been received or at a similar point if there is no final deliverable due. Conduct a facilitated review and lessons learned session with all participants. Publish the results to all involved.

(This meeting should be scheduled before the post project celebratory function – if you were planning on having one.)

3. After the consultants have left, conduct an additional facilitated review and lessons learned session, with the internal team only, in order to produce a final report. Be honest. Use the lessons learned to enable your organization to be a better consumer of consulting services on future projects and to help you interact more effectively with the consultants on those future projects.

The reasons post engagement reviews aren’t usually conducted as thoroughly as they should be are simple; time and money. As usual, it all comes down to priorities.

If time or money is a real problem, a much shorter method is also available. It involves doing nothing and hoping for better results next time. Unfortunately, results can’t be guaranteed.