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The Art of Consulting05.11.09

Why external consultants?

There is nothing wrong with developing projects in-house, if

you have the required free human resources
those resources are properly qualified
and they act upon the following maxim: Increase the company's value

The problem usually starts with the first point. Projects are per definition singular and new events, and as they are non-recurring, there is not a stable number of projects to work on. If you have free human resources, then you must answer the question if those resources are under-utilized in project-free time. If you do not have free resources, the temporary increase in headcount most of the time is a mid-term disadvantage. The problem is "solved" most often by assigning employees to projects that have to do project work alongside their daily work. The outcome is easy to forecast: either you have bad progress, missed windows of opportunities and missed deadlines in the project, or you get poor results on the project members' regular work. External consultants can be hired virtually from one day to the other, so that you can cope with peaks in project workload, and that you can seize opportunities when they arise. Likewisely, after you got your benefit, there is no additional headcount that will eat into your profit cake.

If you answered the human resources question, qualification is the next topic. Consultants see not only one industry from the inside but many. Due to that, external consultants can lead the client to insights that a company would not be able to produce on its own constrained by the administrative daily routine and locked up in unchallenged patterns of thought.

If you solved the human resource problem and also were lucky to get the right set of skills, do not forget about the human element. Projects that are developed only internally are never entirely free of internal politics. It starts with little things like sentiments of employees towards each other and ends at project decisions that are taken not in the best interest of the company but in the best interest of single individuals. External consultants are free from such incentives as we do not take personal interest in which solution makes the race except the best one for our client. Especially our focus on profitability helps the top management to implement this target at the neuralgic spots within the company.

What questions do you need to answer yourself?

What are the client's problems?
How are they viewed and rated by the client?
Which solutions are on the table?
What is the goal of the consulting with respect to these problems?
What are the deliverables for the consultants?
What is the return-on-investment from the consulting itself for the client?

How does consulting start?

Yes, there are consultants that knock on the clients' doors with their suitcases of knowledge, open them and start to give well-meant advice. If you want prefabricated solutions, give us a call. We will be happy to connect you to our competitors.

What has been good advise yesterday is misinvestment tomorrow. So, every project is different and to cope with that fact, understanding the customer and its way of business is vital first. Hence before entering into big contracts, we usually conduct small scale workshop with our customer to get clear answers to the six questions from above.

Our workshops are priced competitively and also help us to commit to realistic and transparent costs, before the client decides to entrust us with a full scale project. In all our offers you will find our commitment to support our client, when implementing these goals at the operative level.

What do we require from our clients?

Good consulting cannot be ordered like a pizza. Good consulting also requires a commitment from the client. We require:

access to project relevant business information (master data & transaction data)
a reasonable budget for the project member involved on the client side
a client side project coordinator with the respective authority.

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