Toolkit

Managing management consultants

There are ten useful rules for firms to bear in mind when hiring and managing consultants:

1. Stay up with the experts: You can outsource many things, but it's dangerous to have blind faith in an outside expert. The less you know about a important topic, the more time you are likely to waste with consultants and the more dependent you will be on their opinions. Inferior knowledge leads to inferior consulting.
2. Leave nothing to chance: Scoping the project should include a definition of business results, what needs to be done, exclusions and assumptions, the specification of individual tasks, and acceptance criteria for the whole solution. It is also important to break the work down into controllable phases and to have a clear and up-to-date exit strategy. You always need a Plan B.
3. Specify clearly who is responsible for what: You need to see the resumes of the majority of the consulting team, to know how much time each member of the team will commit, and to agree the extent and means by which the consulting team will interact with your staff. If the scope is clear, then agreeing this will be simple, but, if the project is likely to involve changes within your organisation, these issues need to be thought through prior to employing consultants. Small cracks in a project structure become fissures under stress. You cannot rely on consulting firms stepping in to take responsibility for a problem that has been overlooked. Contracts are usually designed to encourage consultants to do their own job well, not the client’s job.
4. Choose the right people, not the right firm: The complaint from clients that they only see the senior consultants at the sales pitch and not on the project itself is as old as consulting and the best way to prevent that being an issue is to insist on meeting the people who will actually be working on your project, interviewing them individually as though you were going to recruit them, and making your final decision on that basis.
5. Respect your consultants, and ask them to respect you. Consultants can be like plumbers: looking at your leaking pipes, they shake their heads over the workmanship of their predecessors. There are few things more frustrating than being forced to repair something you already thought of as fixed. So it is not surprising that clients complain bitterly about consultants who, invited in to work on a particular topic, question how the client has arrived at this point. Clients find this condescending and irritating – evidence of consultants’ unwillingness to acknowledge the practical constraints of the real world. But, in asking consultants to respect your circumstances, you need to reciprocate, taking consultants’ commercial imperatives into account.
6. Be open. Working together effectively requires a degree of honesty on both sides. Many clients pretend that what they want is help when they really just want the consultants to do everything. In other instances, clients do want consultants to do everything, but then interfere and try to fix the answer. Trustworthy communication is crucial to success.
7. Acquire long-term skills from the consultants, not just an immediate “fix”. Skills transfer is one of the most important benefits of using consultants, because it gives us greater capability in the future. Nevertheless, the fact that many consultants are poor at knowledge transfer is not evidence of a a conspiracy to increase fees, but proof of the obstacles to transferring skills between organisations. Most clients – and consulting firms – pay lip service to an ideal, while making little effort to achieving this in practice. It needs to be built into your plan, and it costs money to achieve.
8. Demand that consultants make a difference: Clients complain that consultants leave no “footprint” behind them, that the client organisation continues just as it did before the consultants intervened. Making an impact is more than consultants taking a broader view of an issue or bringing in new skills. Clients need to change themselves too, and recognise that consultants will not take risks on “making a difference” as long as they believe they will be the scapegoats for failure. They must have a failure tolerant environment, and, if they are going to avoid mistakes, they need to be coached intensively. Making a big difference usually means taking big risks, and often an implied shift from adviser to implementer. This needs to be recognised by both sides.
9. Do not rely on the contract. Unfortunately, with all the requirements and safeguards written into a contract, if the contract begins to go bad, there is often no way to stop the downhill spiral. All the insurance and licensing in the world will not prevent the project capsizing. Clients are now wary of too much reliance on the contract: as consulting contracts become larger and more complex, the probability that important issues get overlooked or ignored increases. Experience, especially from the litigious US market, is clear: where consulting projects succeed, it is not because they had the right contract in place.
10. Create a partnership: It is depressing that clients continue to make the same old complaints, even while being lauded for increasing sophistication in their dealings with consultants. It must be because companies find it harder to practise than preach. Why? Because they reflect the fluid boundaries of the new consulting world, rather than the them-and-us approach which has characterised consulting in the last two decades. Confrontational consulting rarely delivers success.