EnglishMaximize the Value of Your Consulting Engagement
Sitting down with your executive team, you’ve digested the findings found in the Opportunity Assessment that Trindent Consulting conducted on several key areas of your organization. Impressed, and ready to achieve the sustainable financial improvements Trindent has outlined, you and your team decide to proceed forward with the Engagement proposal.
Before the work starts, here are the three key things you should know in order to maximize the value of your consultants.
- Your Team Plays a Central Role in Steering the Ship
An implantation engagement is a complex process and can face a number of challenges that would stymie its true value potential. While consulting teams are used to working through whatever obstacles they face, being able to collaborate with the right client team is necessary to keep the engagement on track and maximize its value.
One example where good client collaboration is key is keeping the work within scope. Consultants frequently receive requests to complete or analyze work outside the defined scope of the engagement. There are circumstances where these asks may be appropriate, but often they are not, and they run the risk of sending the engagement down a proverbial rabbit hole.
To the person making the request, the additional task may seem minimal, something that shouldn’t take long given the expertise of the consultants, but these requests add up, and if left unchecked can divert attention away from the true objective of the engagement.
In situations like these, consultants necessarily rely on the expertise of the client team to help navigate the ship in the right direction, saving time and avoiding wasted effort in order to maximize the value of the project.
2. Get Ahead of This Detail
When a project enters the Engagement phase, it’s most likely not the only ongoing initiative within the organization. Most companies will have several on-going projects running concurrently. The Financial Evaluation your company will be doing throughout the life of these projects will see savings being found, but without a clear delineation as to what initiative they originated from.
Halting or delaying any engagement schedule to ascertain the source of benefits is counterintuitive to adding value. It’s easy to get caught up in details, but project schedules need to stay on track and not lose momentum in order to maximize the savings your company will realize. Therefore, it’s important for your leadership team to know when projects go live and what benefits they are projected to find. This way, savings can quickly be attributed to their respective programs and schedules can stay on target.
With a Trindent engagement, you will be able to refer to our Method Change documentation, which will clearly outline the key activities and calculated savings within the cost-benefit analysis to allow you to easily track the savings our initiatives are finding.
3. Regular Project Updates Lead to Success
There is a long-standing belief that consulting projects conceal the value they create or that the achievements of these projects are untraceable. However, part of Trindent’s process is to hold weekly Engagement Status Report meetings with client management teams to update them on progress against targets, to celebrate the wins, and to discuss setbacks or challenges. Project outcomes are openly examined, and annualized savings are reviewed.
These meetings are your team’s opportunity to maximize the value of an engagement, and it’s therefore important that they attend the meetings regularly and stay involved as much as possible. The meetings give your team regular and recurring visibility to the progress of an engagement and whether it’s tracking against targets. They give your team the opportunity to provide guidance in areas of challenge, and a chance to voice concerns that can be resolved before they become a larger issue that affects the project. These meetings are key to a successful project outcome.
Maximum Long-Term Value
Trindent engagements aim for sustainable changes that last and continue to yield benefits for a long time. But it’s critical to have good collaboration between clients and consultants to maximize the benefits of process, system, and behavior changes. Your team has an important role to play in the success of any engagement.
