consultancy cycle

1.5 Explain how to overcome challenges and risks which may arise during the consultancy cycle

Many consultants will experience severe delivery challenges and require effective ways to transitioned through it. As former UK prime minister Winston Churchill famously said: “If you are going through hell, keep going.”

Consultants often develop their skills by working on a series of smaller or medium-sized projects for a couple of years, then proceed to become involved in bigger projects often as the lead-contractor. Such larger challenges can be exciting and (if they go well) tremendous for the consultant’s CV. But, with larger-scale consultancy projects, arrives larger-scale risk. Particularly when hiring in the right experts becomes an expensive up-front cost.

In this section we look at the major challenges and risks of stepping up and managing larger consultancy projects, and how to overcome these challenges.

1. Larger projects need more control

For the most part, bigger projects are more complex, uncertain and risky, either because the impact of the project is greater, the scale of the team required is larger and also because there are more users and stakeholders (PMI: 2017).

In order to manage this added complexity, there is a need for the project manager to utilise a mature project management method so that they can exercise a greater level of control. Project Management (PM) is a set of methods and approaches that allows us to control a risky and uncertain initiative, and we will cover the popular methods later in this module. As a general rule-of-thumb, the more complex and uncertain the project, the more control and structure we need Kerzner: 2013).

2. Bring in the right experts

Often within consultancy there is a temptation (perhaps to keep costs down and important allies onboard) to ask existing friends and colleagues to support the project. However, the implications of misrunning a project that is technically more challenging or that has a more complex domain is profoundly important upon a consultant’s reputation and livelihood (Bingley: 2013).

Most big consultancy projects will be initiatives whereby there will be demands to use and master new technology, new materials, new processes, new designs or new techniques. This is clearly a step up in complexity from smaller or medium-sized consultancy projects whereby the project manager/consultant often doubles-up as the subject matter expert.

When the domain is more challenging, the consultant will require a team of qualified experts to help them deliver to a high standard and meet the expected deliverables. The consultancy project will require a subject matter expert who is responsible for specifying what it is that needs to get built. This person could be a certified expert who might be required to sign-off on specific legal documentation. Or a particular software or systems expert who understands the user’s needs and who can document and articulate them in a way that enables the rest of the team to design or produce exactly what is required. Cutting costs on bringing in such expertise, can lead to huge time and cost overruns in the longer-term, particularly if damage is caused to the clients’ systems or customers.

3. Further testing

A more technically complex domain also means that more effort is required to Quality Assure and test the product or service that you are going to provide.

Consultant teams are required to ensure that everyone on the team understands how the product will be quality assured and what is required

specifically of them. Consultants often need to agree whose role it is to create the test plans and who will be carrying out the actual tests. Wherever possible, involve the end users in the testing in addition to the project team. Consultants will be responsible for checking (and in some cases, arranging) for additional insurances and liability coverage.

Other methods that can consultants to reduce risk is to prototype the deliverable solution and to roll it out gradually – perhaps across a pilot group or control group, involving fewer sensitive areas of the client’s business. Prototyping is a great way to trial whether your product is going to work effectively, and it gives the users sight of what will be. Gradually releasing or rolling out a product to different user groups or market segments, further helps to reduce risk and control the project. For a conjunction of harmonising speedy progress to meet deliverables as well as ensuring quality control during the process, a useful book has been produced by George, Maxey and Rowlands (2004) which has become a staple publication upon the bookshelves of consultants and Project Managers. Adopting Lean Six Sigma management approaches the experts apply the DMAIC 5-phases model – covered elsewhere in this module - to various scenarios and cases. To remind ourselves:

Figure 1: DMAIC and its application to Quality Control:

Source: http://www.free-management-ebooks.com/news/six-sigma-dmaic/

Exercise - Please now pause at this point and read further into the DMAIC model. Ask yourself: how can using this model assist with Quality Control across an entire project that I may be managing?

4. Consultants need to form teams, these will need their leadership

Another significant change when running a bigger project is that the consultant, perhaps used to working alone, now has a team. This means however that there is a need for the consultant to step up and become a real leader – not just a task allocator. A team needs to be led by an inspiring Project Manager who makes the team feel that they belong, that their contributions matter, and that taken together, the team is well worth the client’s precious investment of time and money (Belbin: 2010).

Consultants can overcome challenges to team leadership by one-to-one conversations, team building activities and by ensuring that members are really engaged and included within the process of achieving an inspiring set of goals. Often within consultancy teams, members become sunk by the detail and withdraw into silos. This is because many consultants and ‘associates’ don’t feel that they are fully part of the client’s organisation because they are not a full-time employee. Therefore, consultant leaders should provide extra layers of team development support and encouragement. One method that is particularly effective is organising mentoring and information exchanges within the team. There are also lots of podcasts and books on the topic of building great teams including Susan Wheelan’s Creating Effective Teams (2009) and Meredith Belbin’s classic: Team Roles at Work (2010).

5. Analyse, manage the stakeholders

On bigger projects consultants are also likely to have more stakeholders to interface with – that’s people who have an interest in the project or who are affected by it.

To consider and understand who all of the stakeholders might be, you need a formal approach for understanding who they are, what their needs are and how to best involve them and communicate with them. This is known as ‘stakeholder analysis’ and the task in complex environments has been called ‘stakeholder mapping’. Increasingly, considerations include corporate social responsibility duties and negative publicity considerations (Goodpaster: 1998) (Blokdijk: 2015).

As any good consultant begins a project, they will make a conscious effort to first identify all the stakeholders and then analyse each person. They might even document their key findings and share them across the team. They will seek to find out what each person’s stake or interest in the project is, what a successful project looks like to them, and how each key stakeholder would to be communicated with. Consider making an effort to tailor your communication to each of the key stakeholders. For example, some stakeholders would be happy to receive a weekly status report, others would prefer a regular meet-up and others will demand that they are called/contacted whenever something significant happens.

Now, read more into ‘stakeholder analysis’ before you progress into our next given exercise.

Reflective Exercise:

Imagine that you are an external consultant in charge of changing the procurement of IT systems from one police force, to a group of three police forces. In your notebook, identify a list of primary and secondary stakeholders who might be significantly and directly

impacted by your consultancy project management task and approach.

6. Put in place formal governance

On a bigger project a consultant will also need to understand the formal governance structure and escalation paths. This needs to be done with as much tact and diplomacy as possible, because they will already have a key contact and liaison allocated to them within the client company. (This is often the person who signed-off on hiring them.) On big consultancy projects, a governance structure is sometimes about agreeing who should attend the weekly working group meeting and who sits on the steering committee. Whereas the working group will meet weekly to work through the detail of the project, the steering committee is a monthly forum for the project’s senior decision-makers. It might be the case that the consultant is also required to attend a similar process on the client side.

This is mostly a place whereby the consultant will inform the committee about progress and whereby they might seek guidance around major risks or issues that are beyond your remit. As consultants present to client committees and team meetings, they should be well aware of the politics in the room and what each person is looking to gain from the meeting. (Projects often fail due to internal foot-dragging and resistance for employees who have not developed a relationship with the external adviser/consultant.) (Belbin: 2010) If some of the steering committee members have a tendency to derail the meeting, deploy an offensive diplomatic method and seek to meet with each key person beforehand to prepare them and to talk them through any sensitive topics and provide them with a sense of importance and inclusivity.

7. Control scope

As there are more moving parts on a larger project – more dependencies, more stakeholders and more uncertainty – it also means that scope is more

likely to change as an external consultant tries to progress through their project towards hitting the deliverables.

Changes to scope aren’t necessarily a problem as long as the consultant remains in management control of them and ensures that the changes make sense and don’t erode the overall purpose of their mission.

One way to handle this is by implementing an effective change control process which helps any manager to log the changes and analyse the impact that they will have on the project’s time, cost, quality and business benefits.

Many consultants get anxious when their clients ask for a change, but as long as they carry out a thorough impact analysis and clearly communicate it, they should remain on the right track. If the change is worth implementing, then the consultant should get it formally approved by the steering committee (or senior management team) and ensure that extra time or budget are allocated (Tecce: 2009).

8. Stay on top of the risks

We have already stated that the level of risk is likely to be much higher on a larger-scale mission or project. For this reason, the consultant will require a more formal and structured project management approach. One of the elements that form part of such a structured approach is a formal risk management process that will help them to stay on top of the tasks as well as pro-actively do something about the many things that could go wrong. List out all of the risks and insert ideas and actions for reducing or eliminating the risk.

The first step in staying on top of risks is for the consultant leader to make it a joint responsibility of the entire consulting team. They might achieve this by organising regular risk management workshops; for example, the team leader might ask the team to brainstorm everything that they worry about going wrong.

Secondly, consultants should assess each risk in terms of its likelihood and potential business impact. After determining what the top risks are, decide what to do about them and assign an owner to each. In this way, the consultant team can create its own risk culture, which everyone is a part of and whereby the leader doesn’t end up owning all the risks (which is extraordinarily time-consuming).

Summary

When consultants make the transition from managing smaller and mediumsized projects to larger ones, they will need to employ a much more structured project management approach, as larger projects contain more risk and uncertainty.

They will need to identify the right experts, with the correct qualifications, in order to implement the tasks and reach the deliverables. Furthermore, because the impact is high on a large project, they will need to conduct stakeholder analysis and really understand how best to communicate with the entire range of audiences who are impacted (not just the client).

Consultant leaders also should focus on creating a collaborative culture whereby they jointly agree how to assure the quality of your project, control scope and manage risks. One of the secrets to running larger projects is to get better at spreading the workload. This subsidiarity, trust and delegation is often hardest to achieve in the mindset of most consultants, who, tend to thrive and survive on working alone and up against the clock.

Further Reading:

Meredith Belbin, R. (2010) Team Roles at Work. London: Routledge; 2nd Revised edition

Rumelt. R, (2012) Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and why it Matters. London: Profile Books

Lewis, S., (2011) Positive Psychology at Work: How Positive Leadership and Appreciative Inquiry Create Inspiring Organizations. Wiley-Blackwell. Chichester UK

References:

PMI (2017) A Guide to the Project management Body of Knowledge. Accessed on 19/1/2020 at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/guide-Project-ManagementKnowledge-Guides/dp/1628251840/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_0/259-35841874519039?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1628251840&pd_rd_r=e069f1da-131e4998-addc5978d97a89db&pd_rd_w=SVweZ&pd_rd_wg=yk64H&pf_rd_p=e44592b5e56d-44c2-a4f9dbdc09b29395&pf_rd_r=3KDYAV3WQQFGYFT2DX69&psc=1&refRID=3KDYAV 3WQQFGYFT2DX69

Kerzner, H. (2013) Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling. London: John Wiley & Sons

George, Maxey and Rowlands (2004) The Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook: A Quick Reference Guide to 100 Tools for Improving Quality and Speed: A Quick Reference Guide to 70 Tools for Improving Quality and Speed. London: McGraw-Hill

Bingley, R. (2015) The Security Consultant’s Handbook. Ely: IT Governance Press

Meredith Belbin, R. (2010) Team Roles at Work. London: Routledge; 2nd Revised

edition

Goodpaster, K., (1998) Business ethics and stakeholder analysis (Working paper / Division of Research, Harvard Business School)

Blokdijk, G., (2015) Stakeholder Analysis - Simple Steps to Win, Insights and Opportunities for Maxing Out Success. US: Complete Publishing

Wheelan, S. (2009) Creating Effective Teams: A Guide for Members and Leaders. London: Sage

Tecce, D. (2009) Dynamic Capabilities & Strategic Management. Oxford: Oxford University Press