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.

Portfolio Management and BI

Below is an excerpt from the white paper Planning Your BI Program: A Portfolio Management Approach by senior consultant, Kimberly Nevala. In this white paper, Kimberly discusses ways in which your BI Program is, in many ways, very similar to your personal financial portfolio, and how, by applying some of the same principles you apply to your own finances, you can create a sustainable approach to optimize and capitalize on your corporate information. You can download the full paper here.

Portfolio Management and BI

In a very real sense, your BI program is an investment akin to your corporate or personal financial portfolio. It is multifaceted, dynamic, and subject to sometimes unpredictable internal and external pressures. Just like a financial portfolio, BI represents a significant, strategic investment and requires a similar level of discipline relative to its ongoing, deliberate management and control.

Figure 1: Balancing BI Investments

As seen in Figure 1, taking a portfolio management approach to BI implies we must continuously:

• Understand business strategies and objectives
• Monitor internal business performance, as well as external industry and economic trends
• Identify business opportunities and needs
• Balance opportunities against available capital, enterprise resources and risk/reward ratios (aka ROI)
• Deploy appropriate business intelligence capabilities to confirm and/or capitalize upon selected opportunities

In the investment parlance, portfolio management can be active or passive. Immature BI programs tend to focus on passive—or reactive—capabilities. They are focused on basic reporting about events that have occurred and simple analytic extrapolations. They are usually based on ad hoc requests and lack of user prowess with toolsets. Mature BI programs include (pro)active capabilities such as forecasting, predictive analysis and data mining. In addition, these capabilities—or outputs thereof—are integrated into the business’s decision-making and management processes.

Continue reading here.

Just Like Your Investments, Manage Your Portfolio for Better BI

By Kimberly Nevala, Senior Consultant

 

Given today’s economy, companies and individuals alike are reevaluating their investments.  Like many, I did the research when establishing my own investment portfolio.  And things ran pretty smoothly for a while.  And then we all know what came next.  Market volatility aside, I realized something vital: Truth be told, I wasn’t actively managing all aspects of my portfolio.  My bottom line paid the price.

And so it is with many BI programs.  After an initial concerted effort, many clients find their BI investments faltering.  Some start with basic enterprise or financial reporting solutions that fail to evolve.  Some find initial data warehousing investments deliver a mountain of data, but a dearth of actionable information.  Often, the BI team falters in the face of an increasing avalanche of requests.   Worst case, they never get off the ground.  Too many needs.  And no method to vet and prioritize them.

The answer: Manage your BI program like a portfolio.  Wikipedia defines portfolio management as the process of “organizing both projects and programs into a single portfolio to ensure they are kept aligned with corporate strategy”.  Underscore “kept.” To be successful, you must first define strategic and tactical business objectives, identify associated BI opportunities or needs, and lay out a roadmap for execution.  Equally important is an ongoing process to both evaluate the effectiveness and relevancy of existing BI investments (a.k.a. reports and/or analytic applications) and proactively identify and prioritize new opportunities against evolving business strategies. The formation of a BI Portfolio, when done right, ultimately informs your BI development pipeline.

Today my investment portfolio looks vastly different from six months ago, let alone a year.  It is more dynamic, requiring active management.

Your company’s BI portfolio is no less strategic or dynamic.  Are you managing it accordingly?

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Kimberly Nevala is a senior consultant specializing in MDM and CDI program planning, design, and governance at Baseline Consulting, a technology and management consulting firm specializing in data integration and business analytics. 

The Value of a BI Scorecard Assessment

By Robert Stone, Senior Consultant

A beacon in the night. A BI Scorecard is just that. And more.

Your team works hard. You have meetings. You go to the trade shows. Yet your business intelligence is not driving the business as it should. It’s lagging and it’s telling you what the history of the business was—and not guiding the business to better decisions. After many years of development and a lot of investment, you have the same reports you had five years ago, just nicer looking. What you need is a beacon to guide you, a scorecard on your business intelligence environment that points you to key leverage points that may be limiting the flexibility of your business intelligence.

Awhile back, I was part of a team to do a BI Scorecard for an insurance company. Business was dissatisfied with the quality and agility of the business analysis reporting. IT was swamped with report requests and changes to the data warehouse and had little bandwidth to step back and take a fresh look at their BI environment. It’s the ol’ can’t see the forest for the trees adage. Nobody’s to blame, but it happens all the time and it often takes an outsider to see the root issues.

Business and IT both agreed to bring us in to interview business users and IT staff. We focused on six core areas and did a comprehensive set of interviews—plus we did an analysis of their documentation and reports to verify that what we were told matched their actions. In practice, Baseline’s BI Scorecard is all about measuring the right things in the real world—not what it should be if the world was perfect. That is why we take into account the maturity level of the organization and develop an action plan for moving forward that matches the client’s abilities.

In the end, we met with everyone involved to present our findings. These meetings are not meant to be a blame game; they’re a learning experience. Each person, at some point during the meeting, was surprised by the findings, but all were told often that they were doing a great job under the current conditions. We worked out a series of next steps and milestones with them.  It was a win-win for business and IT, and a year later, they had reached a new level in their business intelligence reporting.

photo by Tony The Misfit via Flickr

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Robert Stone has been with Baseline Consulting over 9 years and is a Managing Consultant responsible for leading and managing large and small projects.  He has over 25 years of IT experience with a diverse knowledge and skill base, and he's focused his skills on using technology to empower business users in many industries.

Triple Play Package for MDM

By Bob Wall, Senior Consultant

Several months ago I decided to upgrade my home internet connection to broadband and discovered that several of the carriers offered a bundled package that allowed me to not only get an upgrade for my internet service, but also for my telephone and television services at the same time. It would offer better speeds, consolidate my bills and most importantly save me money. This bundle is often referred to as a “triple play” deal. So recently I decided to upgrade to a triple play package and I have been extremely pleased with the services and the cost savings.

Baseline offers a similar set of services that we deliver to companies to help out with with their master data management strategy. It’s called the “MDM Masterplan” and it combines a set of MDM specific tasks and skills to deliver an overall MDM roadmap. This can save companies an inordinate amount of time and money, focusing them quickly on their objective and how to reach them. The service is its own type of  “Triple Play for MDM.”  Instead of an internet, telephone and television bundle, the service bundles three core MDM activities:  Business Scoping, Architecture & Technology Review, and Roadmap Development:

Business Scoping is analogous to the internet service in the home triple play package because it allows you to discover the company’s readiness and chart a path—kind of like a Google search!

Through review of business and IT documentation and interviews of key IT executives, MDM sponsors, key business and IT stakeholders, try to understand their concerns for MDM, opportunities for further efficiencies, the organization’s business priorities and challenges, and MDM business requirements.

Architecture & Technology Review is analogous to the telephone service in the home triple play package because the strength of the telephone service is the backbone architecture design and technology network of the service provider.

Through review of the “current state” technology development and processing environment, a gap versus the “desired state” environment, and  identification of the existing methods, practices, and functional capabilities available to support the business capabilities associated with MDM, come up with a blueprint for an MDM architecture and the required technology to support it.

Roadmap Development is analogous to the television service in the home triple play package because you can tune in and plan your future viewing.

Reconcile the business and technical findings to produce a moving forward MDM implementation plan that is based on the company strategy, business priorities, and technical activities necessary to deliver an MDM initiative in an iterative, business-driven approach. 

In summary, this “Triple Play for MDM” can assist a company in preparing for an MDM implementation and ensure that MDM is not only well-planned, but well-packaged and priced for success!

photo by rick (via Flickr)

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Bob Wall is a senior consultant with Baseline Consulting. He is an information technology specialist with 30 years experience in all areas of data warehouse administration, data architecture, data resource management, training, and applications systems development, as well as in corporate management.

IT and Business Alignment Begins with Listening

By Robert Stone, Managing Consultant

A lot has been written about the topic of IT –business alignment. We see it in action at our clients all the time. Baseline even offers a course on the topic.  I’ve made certain observations about it in my client work over the years that I’d like to share in this blog post.

We find that business intelligence projects are often the optimum way for companies to achieve tighter IT-business alignment. That’s because IT - business alignment will succeed only if you’re solving a business problem.  IT should not show up at a meeting with business users and recite a laundry list of everything they can do.  They should also avoid discussions of technology or existing reports. Instead, they should ask the business what their problems are.  Stakeholders actually enjoy describing what is preventing them from achieving their strategic goals or, at an individual level, what is preventing them from being more productive in their daily work.  IT should listen to the concerns of the business stakeholders and then determine how they can help in an effective manner.   Successful projects will become more frequent because IT already knows the business problems in detail before the project ever begins.

photo by Orange_Beard

Alignment is really all about building a relationship of trust.  If you constantly help business find reasonable and effective solutions then they will trust you.  Trust is also doing what you say—much easier with a set of articulated business requirements in place—and this requires good data management and business intelligence capabilities.

Alignment is not about pitching the business on a new project, the latest BI tool, or the latest methodology. It’s about establishing rules of engagement that can only be followed after earning the stakeholders’ trust.

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Robert Stone has been with Baseline Consulting over 9 years and is a Managing Consultant responsible for leading and managing large and small projects.  He has over 25 years of IT experience with a diverse knowledge and skill base, and he's focused his skills on using technology to empower business users in many industries.

Dirty Little (Data) Secret: Baseline in the Field

Inasmuch as Baseline’s partners and senior consultants are in the industry and on the speaking and publishing circuit, our bread-and-butter business is working with Global 2000 businesses to deploy business information. This business information is cross-functional. It’s strategic and operational. And often, it originates from cryptic legacy systems that don’t talk to one another, much less well-meaning programmers. The data is dirty, to say the least. The BI tools are ready, but in the course of the data deployment they may have gotten a bad rap. And clients often don’t know what to do next.

We help them with all these things. In the course of doing this work we’ve become acutely aware that with every client engagement comes another lesson learned. Or two. Or three. The mission of our In the Field blog is to share those lessons. Many of them are hard-won. Many of them we see on almost every engagement. And many of them are likely in your future. So let’s talk about them here. We look forward to seeing you here—and reading your comments. Come back often to see what’s happening in the field!