Working With Consultants Without Losing Control
Bringing in outside help is one of those decisions that works very well or quietly wastes a lot of money, and the difference usually has less to do with the firm than with how the engagement was set up.
The good news is that the things that make it work are all on the client side, and none of them are complicated.
Know what you are buying
There are three fairly different things people mean by consulting help, and confusing them is the root of most disappointment.
You might be buying a decision, where you need somebody to look at a situation and tell you what they think, with reasoning. You might be buying capability, where you know what needs doing and need hands and expertise to do it. Or you might be buying transfer, where the point is that your own people can do this afterwards.
Those require different scopes, different deliverables and different amounts of your own time. Decide which one you are buying, and say so out loud in the first conversation.
Write the problem down before the first meeting
The most productive engagements start with a client who can describe, in a page, what is going wrong, who it affects, what it costs and what they have already tried.
You do not need to know the answer. Knowing the answer is what you are paying for. But a vague brief produces a vague proposal, and then neither side can tell whether the work succeeded.
If the engagement cannot be judged at the end, it was not defined at the beginning.
Insist on a named person and a real scope
Two things protect you more than any contract clause.
The first is knowing who will actually do the work. Not the person who sold it, the person who will be in your business. Ask directly, and ask what else they are working on.
The second is a scope that names outcomes, exclusions, what you owe them and by when, and how a change gets agreed. Anyone experienced will welcome that conversation, because ambiguity costs them too.
Give them access to the awkward version
The most common way clients waste their own money is by presenting the tidy version of the business.
Introduce the outside team to the people who do the work rather than only to managers. Let them see the spreadsheet that holds everything together. Tell them about the failed project from two years ago and why it failed. Explain the politics, at least the parts that will affect the work.
None of that is embarrassing. All of it is what they need in order to recommend something that will actually survive in your business.
Stay involved, and give decisions quickly
The single biggest predictor of a slow, expensive engagement is a client who cannot decide.
Name one person on your side with the authority to answer questions, and make sure they have real time for it. Agree what happens when they are away. Decide in advance how quickly you will respond to a question, and treat that as a commitment.
Consultants working around an absent decision maker will make assumptions, and you will pay for the ones that were wrong.
Ask for the workings, not just the conclusion
A recommendation you cannot explain to your own team is a recommendation that will not be implemented.
Ask for the reasoning, the options that were considered and rejected, and what would change the answer. Ask what they are least confident about, which is a question good consultants answer honestly and evasive ones do not.
And ask for things your people can use afterwards. Documented processes rather than a slide deck. Configuration notes rather than a finished system nobody understands.
Plan for the day after they leave
Settle this at the start, not at the end. Who owns the documentation and the configuration. What your team needs to be able to do, and who is being trained. What support is included afterwards and for how long. What happens to any accounts or access created for the engagement.
The test of a good engagement is whether you are more capable afterwards, not whether you now need them permanently.
Judge it against what you agreed
At the end, go back to the page you wrote at the beginning. Is the thing that was going wrong still going wrong. Can your people do what you wanted them to be able to do. What would you scope differently next time.
Write that down. It makes the next engagement, with anyone, significantly better.
We work with clients across all three of the categories above, and we are usually explicit about which one a piece of work is. It makes the scope easier to write and the result easier to judge, which is in everybody's interest.
Thinking about bringing someone in? It is worth being clear about which of the three you are buying. Book a consultation, or visit www.expertechsolution.com.
