1.2 Evaluate the role of planning in consultancy interventions

For good reasons, there are many famous quotes about the importance of planning by prominent leaders. Here’s just two:

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” Antione de Saint-Exupery

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Benjamin Franklin

Planning for your consultancy role is absolutely critical. Companies and their management have invested time, money and personal credibility in bringing consultants on-board (Rumelt: 2012). Once on-board, they – and their teams will expect a consultant to deliver.

Therefore, a critical question that consultants must ask themselves is how will they shape their projects to make them successful? When thinking about planning, it is worth thinking in three phases.

1. Pitching (in advance of and during the ‘pitch’ to clients) (Bettger: 1992) 2. Strategy (how do we know what we are going to do, and when?) 3. Execution (how do we ensure that these things actually get done?)

Breaking down your consultancy interventions into plans is therefore much more manageable if the overall processes and tasks are deconstructed and mapped out.

Each of these plans must be treated differently, and with the appropriate attention and resourcing.

Tip 1: You can disagree about what is included within a plan, but you must agree with company management about what the plan is intended to accomplish. (Ensure that there is senior buy-in.)

Now let’s look at three types of plans that are important for a professional consultant. We will examine what the purpose of each is, and what warning signs might be triggered if something isn't going smoothly in each stage.

You will see that all of these planning phases interact with each other.

1. During the Pitch

Why do we have a plan at this stage?

To understand the scope of a project, that we are the right ‘fit’ for the client, and that the client is the right ‘fit’ for us. It is ill-advised to press ahead with a project that has a big chance of failing because the two organisations cannot agree on the scope, objectives or type of approach (Bettger 1992 revised). For planning and sales pitches there are few better books than Frank Bettger’s famous guide provided within our references (below).

What should our plan do?

• Address the client's needs (as far as they are understood, these should be stated in an agreement such as a delivery schedule or appendix of roles and responsibilities attached to a Memorandum of Understanding or legal contract) • Reflect the limitations of what we can offer and what the client can execute • Get the right order of magnitude (span and size and ‘commitment’) for project size

Benefits of presenting a draft plan to the pitch

1. It is usually the first time that you are dealing with this audience. In the limited timespan of your pitch a good ‘draft’ plan will demonstrate your competence, experience and grasp of the challenge. 2. Optical presentations and plans command authority and help to build interpersonal trust (Adair: 2009).

3. A good draft plan helps to encourage dialogue and mutual brainstorming with people that you don’t know. This immediately brings down social barriers and builds personal chemistry.

A good plan at pitch stage is, essentially, a straightforward summary of what needs to happen and in what order. It's where everything begins, before the engagement has even started; it serves as a roadmap that all parties can provisionally buy in to.

Tip 2: The other piece of data that is presented concurrently with the plan shown is a draft budget, which is essentially the size of the project or the proposed bandwidth that your consultancy team will dedicate to it.

We should be able to estimate a budget with costs on a monthly basis. While every project is different, there are a lot of things we can estimate with a good degree of accuracy. Tasks to include within your costings include the management-side of your project. A good rule of thumb is to include management and controls activity within your fees because if you don’t, these strict management and project controls might get jettisoned during busy times. Such a lapse in control, poses a risk to your project and professional credibility. Therefore, consider building in to the budget:

• Weekly meetings • Project management (time spent scheduling) • Monthly reports • Some common research reports (this may vary wildly, but it helps to have an average we can point to) • Business tools required (such as software) (Bingley: 2015)

All of the above is essential. It is usual for clients to build in strict calendars for delivery of reports. And to make contract payment conditional on receiving such management data and in an accurate manner. The management controls process carries risk for the consultant though. Because – if from the outset –

they agree to unreasonable monitoring and audit scheduling, this is likely to harm your relationship with a client rather than help it.

Case Study:

We have changed the names of the enterprises for this case study. Protocol Web Services Ltd. Agreed a deal with a Government department to complete unfinished website redesigns and to complete domain migrations. A prior contractor had walked away for unexplained reasons. One Government IT director insisted on an extremely detailed monitoring schedule after the pitch and began introducing arbitrary deadlines for various deliverables. The agreed project duration would coincide with the launch of a new site. The justifications for this (on the client's end) were both to get a better understanding of the work being done for internal development reasons. Due to exhaustive reporting and monitoring work, the consultant team was not able to launch the newly designed website on time. Because of the strict language of their arrangement, there was no flexibility to adapt their delivery strategy or extend the contract duration to accommodate. The work was of a high quality, but the consultant team suffered a late delivery penalty of around 10% which significantly impacted their profit margin as well as caused a ‘drag’ on other client projects.

Reflective learning - Key lessons

Spend half an hour considering three key lessons from the consultant’s perspective of this case study. Jot down your considerations in a notebook.

2. Strategy Phase

As we have seen, agreeing the scope and project conditions at the pitch stage is crucial. The Strategy Stage is therefore all about designing and communicating what we are going to do, and when.

Some clients will present a barrage of questions that threatens to undermine the rest of the scheduled work you're trying to do. In the worst cases, results might be demanded when what you're trying to prioritize is which work should be done.

Tip 3: A client can adjust the priorities of elements within this strategy, but be careful that you do not begin to do more work than there are hours available. For consultants kept on a monthly retainer, it is worth agreeing how many hours their monthly fee equates to and devising a Gantt chart of agreed tasks with timelines. If you work beyond your hours, you are effectively cutting your hourly rate.

A further risk for a consultant is related to time-management. Consultants often like to be highly action-oriented and target ‘quick wins’ and easy enhancements that can quickly build their credibility and trust with the client. Nevertheless, after a few easy outcomes (perhaps a web redesign or the installation of a new CRM software tool), consultants can often see their relationship dry up with the client because they no longer have value. Therefore, consultants must become of more strategic value to their clients.

Leading business leadership author, Professor Richard Rumelt, defines strategy:

“A good strategy is a coherent mix of policy and action designed to surmount a high-stakes challenge.”

For Rumelt, strategy has three elements. These three elements are (1) a cleareyed diagnosis of the challenge being faced, (2) an overall guiding policy explaining how the challenge will be met, and (3) a set of coherent actions designed to focus energy and resources.”

A good approach therefore, for any consultant, is to establish a rapport with the client and its senior team. Figure out the three strategic elements that apply to them and become, de facto, their guide for business challenges and issues related to direction. Demonstrate to them that you are not pursuing narrow personal commercial interests but are actively engaged and interested in growing their business and providing them with a significant Return on Investment (ROI).

Eventually, you'll work out a sequence of work that fits your schedule and addresses the needs of the client. Once you get to that point, you need to figure out how to execute the work. Later (in 2.1) we will examine more closely specific project plans.

3. Execution Phase

Why do we have a plan at the Execution stage?

To work out how we're going to do the work that needs to get done. At this point we're finally we're dealing with something that actually looks like a proper schedule—a real to-do list. Tasks need to be chunked into pieces that are clearly delineated and actionable.

What should this plan do?

• Lay out exactly what actions need to be taken • Let everyone know who is accountable • Let everybody know the timescales

What should we watch out for?

• Tasks that aren't well-defined • Tasks that are defined by outcomes • Employee to task mismatch

• Necessary time needed to coach, explain and teach, is not built in • Realistic schedules (taking in to consideration other business and personal commitments)

Reflective exercise

Internet research:

1. Identify and familiarise yourself with three published ‘activity schedules’ in Google spreadsheets from open source online searches.

2. Identify and familiarise yourself with three published ‘Action Plans’ from open source online searches. 3. Overall, what is your preferred plan and why?

Tip 4: A common problem observed in working with clients in "execution" mode is the tendency to create tasks that aren't welldefined. For instance, if I have "keyword research report" as a line item in my to-do list, I know I'm doing it wrong. Get more specific: Pull data from Searchmetrics, the Google Keyword tool, and Analytics; do analysis in Excel; and so forth.

How to keep track

There are as many methods of keeping track of to-do lists. Such tools for basic projects can be as simple as Gantt charts available within MS Project. Consultants and project managers also use more advanced management tools such as OmniFocus and Asana obsession. The important thing is that at some point, in order to go from a "strategy" phase to actually accomplishing something, you have to come up with a list of actions, and this is the execution phase’s core purpose.

Summary:

Planning gets better with practice. It will have a positive effect on all the projects you work on. However, most plans change and are significantly impacted by events. You can disagree about what's in a plan, but you must agree about what the plan is intended to accomplish (Tecce: 2009).

No matter how well you think you know the client, break your consultancy projects down into three phases. These are, typically, the pitch stage, the strategy stage and the execution stage.

Reflective Learning:

Identify and examine a consultancy project that went wrong. How did it go wrong and how were these errors related to poor planning?

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

References:

Rumelt, R., (2012) Good Strategy Bad Strategy, New York, Profile Books

Bettger (1992) How I raised myself from failure to success in selling. New York: Simon & Schuster

Adair, J. (2009) Effective Communication – The most important management tool of all. London: Pan Books

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

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