What Makes a Great Team Member? This is so true! Our project management team, and some other people I know fit this description pe...
The Dark Secrets Behind Hiring a Consultant
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My name is Alex Silberman. I’m a management consultant. Although reasonably bright, I’m probably not smarter than many of my clients, and in more instances than I care to admit, I’m probably less so. I don’t provide staff augmentation, I’m not a body shop, I don’t follow the framework of the day, I don’t know a great deal about many things, and I am not the solution to all possible problems. I do however have very specific, interesting, and specialized talents and skills.
That all being said quite easily, most customers wouldn’t recognize a superb consultant if they saw one. Most clients will be satisfied being treated as customers by so called consultants.
Perhaps the distinction between customer and client is an odd way to begin an introduction, but that is where we must begin. A customer is someone who purchases goods and services from another. A client receives professional services from a lawyer, an accountant, an architect, etc. I’ll add my own bias to the definition. Serving a client is a position of trust as if the client was a patient. This position of trust brings with it responsibilities and care that go beyond selling services, or the normal ‘standard’ of care.
Sales 101 dictates that to be successful, you must form relationships with your customers and sell value so that you don’t have to fight price. That is a mock approximation to the relationship a trusted advisor has with a client.
A consultant must put his or her own self interests aside in the service of their client. If a solution renders an engagement moot, so that the consultant receives little or no fees but is in the interests of the client, that is what the consultant must counsel. This is not even an ethical consideration, and attempts to treat this as ethics has already missed the point.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with filling temporary staffing needs with people that have certain knowledge so long as they are not called consultants, much like there is nothing wrong with getting a Band-Aid from a street vendor as long as he doesn’t call himself a doctor.
There are two deep dark secrets that most consultancies cannot avoid:
First, most consultancies have the same problem as any other business, which is their inability to fill every position with only senior, intelligent, experienced and creative talent. There are a small handful of consultancies that pride themselves with hiring only the very best from the very best, and they are outstanding, however for most businesses, they are simply out of financial reach.
How do consultancies get by with the normal assortment of average (and some above average) people? Frameworks.
Frameworks are scripts meant to provide consistent results by average people. They provide the tools for any possible project, and rather than being used as guidelines, they are used as all or nothing Sanskrit. This is not always true, however, as a generalization with nominal exceptions, it’s how most projects are run.
To further complicate matters, different frameworks have very different roots and strengths, and at best, a combination of different elements from different frameworks can be useful at certain times.
This is not to imply that frameworks ought to be dismissed categorically as some elements of most frameworks are important indeed, however there are thousands of examples where successful projects and products are conducted without them. Everything from the mouse, to the World Wide Web itself, to the SR71 blackbird (the fastest aircraft that has ever flown), to the entire open source movement have all been created by the skills of talented individuals without a framework to be seen.
Secondly, most consultancies operate on a triple billable model. This means that for all the fees collected, one third covers the consultancy’s overhead, one third is the consultancy’s profit, and one third pays the ‘consultant’ doing the actual work. Although most hiring managers are certainly aware that every business must make a profit, most are unaware that when they pay two hundred dollars an hour for a supply chain consultant, they are in actuality getting a seventy five dollar an hour technician or project manager. Most consultancies do not even provide an uncontested money back guarantee, and relationships are too often broken over the only recourses hiring managers have, which is either deducting from an invoice or escalating significantly beyond the complaint in the hopes of being negotiated back to the extent of the grievance.
Notice the specific mention of a supply chain consultant. Just as a tax attorney may think she’s good at other things when she just may be a fantastic tax attorney, consultants do not have the monopoly on being good at everything.
By now you’re probably annoyed because more often than not, when you’ve hired consultants, you’ve generally gotten technicians. You may also suspect that that this opened kimono on the business of consultancy is not particularly in my best interests. (If you are reading this, then I’m getting fewer holiday cards this year by my consultant friends). This is the responsibility to one’s client, and is the tip of the iceberg when considering a consultant, a consultancy, or even a technician.
This blog is the consultancy corner, and here you will find specific tips and information on how to use consultants, approach projects, and make business decisions solely in your best interests. My name is Alex Silberman, and I’m a management consultant.
Comments (3)
1. 02-03-2009 14:48
Interesting glimpse behind the curtain Alex. What recommendations then do you have for a CIO who wants to make sure he is getting a consulting firm's best people?
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2. 02-03-2009 17:35
At a high level, it's about due diligence as if you were hiring these people, which you are. Start by assessing the nature of the engagement and relationship. Is the engagement a staff augmentation, a specialized skill, commoditized work that is merely outsourced, or a combination? Ask for the consultant's resume, workload (for non-dedicated resources), SLA commitments to other clients, and bench depth.
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3. 02-04-2009 12:12
Thanks for the great thoughts Alex! Having relatively recently left a consulting company, it's interesting how little understood the needs of a client relationship often are. There's an odd dynamic in many consulting practices which puts an emphasis on sales rather than relationship building. When this occurs it provides a definite demoralization for consultants trying to preserve the client's best interests.
I'm glad to see someone else willing to pull the curtain aside for a glimpse of what client engagement really is.
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