In the Field with our Experts

Consulting Terms of Engagement: a Readiness Checklist

By Carol Newcomb, Senior Consultant

Having worked at least half of my professional life either with consultants or as a consultant myself, I need to offer some practical advice on increasing the probability of success on a consulting engagement.

Remember, a consultant is just another tool in your management toolbox that provides either the leverage (expertise/experience) or the hard skills that you and your staff are missing today.

There are three main reasons to hire consultants:  1) you want coaching from expert advisors to mentor your existing team and provide tactical advice; 2) you don’t have the skill-sets that you need (ETL programmers, software/hardware experts, etc.); or 3) to provide frameworks and processes to build and sustain ongoing programs (like business intelligence or data governance).

Regardless of the type of consulting engagement, your staff need to be on board with the presence of consultants in their midst.  Ask yourself, as the sponsor, some basic questions:

• Have you explained to your team what the purpose of the consulting engagement is intended to achieve and their role in making it successful?
• Are you as a sponsor willing and able to provide authority for the consultants on the ground?
• Are you willing to spend time with your team and the consultants in the same room, to work out issues, questions, strategy and tactics as they evolve over time?  Don’t think you can just punt and run.
• Do you have committed resources on your team to help with knowledge transfer?  This is not an “all other duties as assigned” task for your staff.
• If consultants will replace or supplement existing staff, is your staff aware and comfortable with this?  This will inevitably become a problem if the expectations are not managed upfront.
• Are IT and Business ready to start working together?
• Do you have true business users and are they ‘on board’ with your project?
• Is there a way to prioritize issues as they come up?  One thing all consulting engagements do is bring to light an unsightly set of issues that become obstacles to progress.
• Can you be honest about your culture? Are their repeated patterns or behaviors that could sabotage a key project?
• Can you comfortably “park” issues that are not showstoppers in order to move ahead despite them?

There are probably many more items I could include on this “preparedness checklist.”  The point is that consultants can often be perceived as disrupting the natural order of things.  Either you, as their sponsor, will need to introduce them and guide them through the organization to ensure they are effective, or you need to clearly delegate to your staff what the expectations are for them to do the same.  If technical knowledge transfer needs to occur, don’t just assume it will happen.  I have seen too many consultants spend the first few weeks twiddling their thumbs either because they don’t have access to key systems, or they don’t understand the environment and haven’t been provided any documentation to work with in the meantime.  How much time will you allow for consultants to become proficient?

If the consulting engagement is to collect facts, conduct interviews, summarize findings, provide best practices, roadmaps or assessments then make sure they have a political lay-of-the-land upfront.  Otherwise, they will attend meetings they have no context for, they will assume things that may be incorrect, and they will be off-target in their recommendations. Also, many consulting firms sell their methodologies as separate and packaged products. If you expect your consulting firm to transfer its intellectual property as part of the engagement then your consulting contract should stipulate that. If you have secured the funding to bring consultants into your organization, you need to ensure that the project is a win-win.  The risks to you are probably larger than to the consultant group, because at the end of their engagement, they go away.  A good consulting firm will have ensured knowledge transfer along the way, but your staff carries some of the responsibility for that, too. 

If you’re considering or starting a consultant engagement, here are a few things to consider:

• Is your department/division receptive to advice or change?
• Are department heads, directors and managers on board with the engagement?
• If ‘best practices’ are recommended, does the department have the appropriate technical tools and agility to put them into practice?
• Have you done everything within your control to ensure the success of this engagement?

If the answer to any of the above is NO, then reconsider your readiness, regroup with your staff, and discuss alternative strategies with the consulting group you are working with.

If you have an opportunity to change and improve your department, leverage the effort to instill that change.   You may not get more than one chance.

photo by mykpwedding via Flickr (Creative Commons License)

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Carol Newcomb is a Senior Consultant with Baseline Consulting. She specializes in developing BI and data governance programs to drive competitive advantage and fact-based decision making. Carol has consulted for a variety of health care organizations, including Rush Health Associates, Kaiser Permanente, OSF Healthcare, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and more. While working at the Joint Commission and Northwestern Memorial Hospital, she designed and conducted scientific research projects and contributed to statistical analyses.

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