Your quick reference guide to working with consultants (as told by a recovering management consultant)

I started my career as a management consultant and left to join the 'client side' after close to five years of being in the industry, sitting across them for the last few years have taught me one valuable lesson - you need to keep your consultants on their toes.

Regardless whether you love them or consider them as 'con-sultants', it is inevitable for an organization to engage with an external consultant to help them strategize, operationalize, and even wind-down their activities given the increasing pace, complexity, and talent scarcity that we all face today. Having spent my time roughly equally as a consultant and 'client' at this stage of my career, here are some insights to make your investment in external consultants worthwhile.

Make sure you exhaust internal resource and talent pool to solve the issue at hand, before being trigger happy to issue the request for information/proposal

In most of my engagements, the answer to the issue that we were brought in to solve was already known and in front of us. The question was how do we validate the issue, and come to an internal alignment that the issue that we are trying to solve was too complex and resource consuming to handle internally. Even if the issue is too complex (or too mundane) to solve internally, it does not cost much for you to do an internal 'shout out' to get internal input as to what is the right outcome for your consultants to deliver - you might be surprised as to what hidden talent and resource that you have at your disposal, in fact most organizations use consultants just to throw money at the problem to make it disappear.

80% of your selection criteria should be based on the statement of work document, and 80% of statement of work evaluation is on the team profile

Consultants are masters of targeted powerpoint marketing, and as such you should spend more time scrutinizing the statement of work document to validate whether they understood your context, issues, imperatives, and expected outcomes out of this engagement. Make sure what they have stated is clearly understandable, feasible, and most importantly work around the structure of your internal team. Subsequently you would also be smart to employ third party background verification on the people that will be onboarded to your project, because it is common practice for consulting firms to provide a manager on paper but in reality the person is a consultant.

The project team is a very critical success factor to the engagement, and it is important for you to understand what kind of consultant do you (actually) need on the project. You need to identify what kind of profile suits your team, for example do you need a subject matter expert or a do-er to help conduct research and churn your data to get findings. I would even go as far to get an audited document to verify each individual's role, job position, and credentials and it doesn't hurt to get conduct a reference check with their previous clients.

Collaborate as one but keep your consultants on their toes by reminding them that their value as a consultant is on the outcome not deliverables or delivery

Signing off deliverables and delivering the project on schedule are the two main success metric for a consultant, since their internal worth to their firm is based on their cost recovery and billable/chargeable hours - you need to ignore the noise and focus on purely the outcome. But those are expected, and even a novice consulting firm could have done that cheaper.

What you need to start doing instead is focus on the outcome that your organization need, and question everything that is presented to you to ensure what you are getting are really unique, bespoke, valuable insights (or at least information) for you to make a strategic shift and a tactical move. If the insights presented to you are google-able, or available in any journals then you have been conned by the con-sultans.

If you are paying someone to google or copy anything available on the internet that you could have done it yourself, it is a clear sign to ban the consulting firm.

Consultants are just as clueless as you, but they are methodical and can give you that objective perspective learn to give and receive constructive feedback

The talent that they bring to the project is certainly impressive, but you must not also discredit your own team's profile and value to the project itself. My best engagement as a consultant and client is when there is a natural chemistry between what we could do best, and how we could work best together by leveraging on each other's strengths.

One of the most valuable moments that I had as a consultant was when I was given positive feedback by my client and sponsor, they gave me an objective observation and help me navigate the organization to find the data and information I need to deliver. It was such a productive and valuable engagement to a point where I had to seriously consider joining them permanently when they offered me a position much more lucrative than what i was earning.

In short if your consultant is going above and beyond for you, show a wealth of humility in their conduct, and always looking out for the best interest of your organization rather than the subsequent follow on sales - then you have a winning team combination.

Lastly never be starry eyed over a blue-eyed consultant from another continent, when the local consultant would have been better and cheaper

Yup.

For some weird reason, asians tend to value advice given by a blue-eyed consultant from another continent rather than the local consultant that very well have the same or even better advice than the stand-in James Bond. Just ignore the physical appearance, accent, and novelty of a foreign consultant. Focus on what is delivered, and ensure that you bust your own cultural and personal bias when evaluating their advice.

Hope this is useful, and with this insider knowledge this will help you get your fair-value return from your consultants. Until then, keep in touch :)