With or Without You

There's far more to managing consultants than just signing a check

By Moshe Japha

So you look around your shop. What do you see? Legions of laptop-lugging consultants booking conference rooms you didn't even know existed? They're going through flip charts like flapjacks. They're racking up travel expenses that would make James Bond blush. Yet what are they doing? Where's the ROI?

Sure, they promised that with their help you'd survive in the new economy. You'd bring your antiquated, stovepipe systems into the 21st century. You'd eat your competition for lunch (while the consultants ate sushi). But thus far, you're missing your dates left and right, budgets have blown sky-high, your CEO's expressions of concern have caused you to consider doubling your life insurance coverage, and you still don't have much to show for it all.

Is it those hotshot consultants' fault? Is your organization a bunch of losers? Should it be this hard?

It is very hard to strategically expand your IT capabilities. It's supposed to be. The marketplace does not reward mediocrity for long. But it doesn't have to be this hard.

Bringing in a consulting firm can be an effective way to ensure a timely, cost-effective response to strategic business intelligence requirements. This fact is especially true if your internal IT group is overwhelmed by its current load, doesn't have the expertise, or has lost credibility with the user community.

Much has been written about how to choose a consultancy. Just as important, however, is how you manage the relationship once the choice has been made. In this article, I will present seven key disciplines you can employ to manage your consultancy relationship and realize the goals that caused you to consider making such an investment in the first place.

Partnership Is More Than a Marketing Term

Although the word has taken on a lot of baggage of late, the fact is that you are creating a partnership when you bring in a consultancy to help build a strategic component of your infrastructure. Like traditional business partners, you both:

• Stand to mutually gain or lose as a result of the partnership. If the project fails, the consultancy loses what is usually a considerable investment in relationship building. It is unlikely to get much repeat business from you. If the project succeeds, it gets good press from all around. When your project is successful, and you manage it properly, you gain more than the strategic capability the new system provides. You also get a large dose of know-how to enable continued, sophisticated change.
• Must have clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Unfulfilled tasks cause a project to fail and fingers to start pointing. Everyone loses. The first step in avoiding this problem is for everyone to know their jobs and how they fit into the big picture.
• Must build a piece of your business on which your very survival depends. To beat or even keep up with your competitors, your exploitation of information technology must become a part of your core business (a cliche, but true). If you and your consultancy can't "get it together," your business survival is in jeopardy.
• Must trust each other to do their jobs honestly. You must build and earn trust. But there is a way to expedite the process. The contract is the vehicle for building trust. Contracts that spell out in painful detail both parties' obligations do not indicate lack of trust. In fact, they engender it.

Most professionals in this business diligently give it their best shot and are honest. Many of the difficulties between consultancies and clients come from different interpretations of who should be doing what, but isn't. A good contract alleviates much of this problem. Armed with such a contract, you can prevent backroom politics and hallway whispering from undermining the morale, momentum, and direction of the project.

Whether you create a legal contract as part of a fixed-price engagement or develop a plan for governance of a time and materials-based project, you need to specify the rules of the game.

Managing the Consultancy Partnership

Successful management of your partnership then hinges on your applying these disciplines:

• Involve the business throughout the project.
• Build knowledge transfer into the project from day one.
• Own the project and the work product.
• Don't be intimidated by lack of knowledge.
• Don't reinvent the wheel - use an architecture and standards.
• Set up a ubiquitous communications platform.
• Develop the "rules of the game."

Figure 1 illustrates how these disciplines interact to result in a more efficient consulting investment. In this column, I will discuss the first six. The rules of the game is a subject unto itself, which I'll discuss in my next column.

1. Involve the business throughout the project. Enlist subject matter experts (SMEs) to represent the business's interests from the beginning of the project. Your systems are a model of your business. This is especially true when they support strategic business processes, such as data warehouses and data marts. If you are not driven by the owners of the business processes being modeled, you'll end up with an elegant solution to the wrong problem.

In one of my recent projects, I took great advantage of the user community. We built a logical data model of the entire business in only five months. There was unbelievable buy-in from the business users, as they saw the need for a complete overhaul of their systems. As a result, the model we built reflected the users' vision of how the business should be run.

Tragedy struck, however, when the subsequent phases of the project were put on hold for nine months due to political infighting. By the time a new team was brought in to resume the project, the business community had lost enthusiasm. It was no longer interested in making time to retrace the analysis for a new team. Consequently, the new team was hamstrung by its inability to refine the business requirements at lower levels of detail. The very organization that had realized such benefit from involving the user community now paid the price of its reticence.

Although the problem has persisted for more than 30 years, most organizations still operate with a "Berlin wall" between their business and IT areas. If the business indeed is making a strategic shift, it must be intimately involved in what the system does. However, even influencing how it behaves and how people use it is critical to its success. Your organization cannot afford to allow IT to remain ignorant of the business or the business to be ignorant of IT.

A subtle contribution consultants often make is to bridge the traditional chasm between a client's IT and business communities. This niche has been exploited by good consultants for years. Sometimes it takes an outsider to lubricate the communications machinery in an organization. When you choose your consultants, look for the ability to deal well in both worlds, especially if your organization has this problem.