How to choose an IT consultancy to work with?

If an organisation already has an IT department, why would they bother bringing in an external consultant to advise on their strategy?  

This is a question we come across all the time, and the answer is that there is actually lots of reasons you might work with an IT consultancy. For example, a great IT consultant will... 

• Bring an external, unbiased perspective to your existing frameworks, systems and team to help identify new opportunities that might have been previously overlooked. 
• Offer an essential (and sometimes very niche) skillset that will compliment your existing IT department and help overcome any gaps in knowledge so that you can be confident with your next hire.  

• Take some of the pressure off of your IT department by managing project work so that they can focus on maintaining business as usual.  
• Bridge the common communication barrier between IT and other departments within the organisation. 
• Offer a short-term solution to employment gaps which will save you money in the long run.  

But the decision to hire a consultant should never be made in silo. Here are just 5 of the most important factors you should consider before you bring a consultant into your organisation... 

Ethics and culture  

Recruiting consultants should be like recruiting anyone else in your business. They should fit in with your culture and values as they are going to be working closely with your existing teams to discover, analyse and provide relevant recommendations. The only difference between hiring a consultant compared to an internal member of staff is that you also need to check the values of the organisation the consultant is coming from. Just because your internal teams may get on well with the individuals, if their organisation is driven by conflicting values, these will show through in the engagement and potentially cause issues when it comes to working to flexible time scales or the recommendations the consultants make. Speaking to the consultants you will hire is critical, but so is speaking to either the owner or partner of the consultancy you care considering working with to confirm your ethics and culture are a match. 

Agenda and product alignment  

All too often consultancy is led by the products, solutions or services that the organisation is trying to sell. This means that consultants can be driven by internal sales teams to "upsell" additional products or services. Sometimes this is for the benefit of their organisation directly, sometimes it is more discreet, selling services and products that others provide for a commission in return. If this is the case, it doesn't necessarily mean the consultancy is untrustworthy, it just means you need to be on your guard when viewing the recommendations in case they are tainted by a sales agenda. The best way of tackling this is to meet the lead consultant regularly and seek to understand the recommendations as early as possible. Asking for alternative solutions and options that the consultant has considered is also often recommended to ensure you are getting a strategy that is truly in the interests of your organisation. 

Approach to data collection and receiving analysis on data provided  

Whilst it's really difficult to remove bias completely from a consultancy engagement, reducing the bias towards a specific product or solution starts with discovery. Therefore, depending on the engagement, it is also essential to be really clear on the methods and tools that the consultancy will use to gather and analyse the information they collect about the organisation. When being presented with the recommendations it's also important to be able to tie the recommendation back to a risk or an issue found initially in the organisation. 

Their methods of pricing and payment  

There are pros and cons to both types of pricing structures a consultancy might use throughout your engagement. Usually, though, your consultant will use one of the following pricing methods: 

• Fixed price where everything is typically included, providing resource, tooling and expenses that is aligned to an outcome or set of deliverables promised by the consultancy. 
• Time & materials which is where you will agree a day rate across a number of days and you pay based on the number of days engaged. This may include or exclude expenses depending on the rate card you agree with the consultancy. 

Whilst fixed price typically provides a more certain cost, check the small print in the consultant's statement of work as you can be caught out through delays to sharing data or not meeting the timeline that the consultancy has agreed to. Not all consultancies are like this but depending on the price agreed in the first place, it can limit the accuracy or completeness of the final outcome if setbacks occur. If you do choose this route however, it’s sometimes better to overestimate on timescales to allow for some flexibility from the consultancy. That being said, if you opt for a time and materials approach, you may be left paying whilst the consultancy down's tools if they have no data to work with or they are waiting for an interaction that is agreed in your statement of work (SoW), so you’ll often end up paying a similar price one way or the other. 

On site vs offsite working  

Working on or off site should be completely up to you as the employer as most consultants will be practiced in both approaches. Engaging with consultants in person early on and then regularly throughout the engagement means that you will build a strong and effective working relationship – this is what we often strongly recommend for our clients. Being on site next to the consultancy team means you will likely also get more from the engagement and develop your teams' skills internally so that you can reduce consultancy fees in the future. However, this comes with potential expenses costs and, depending on how local the consultancy team, might also influence the overall cost of the engagement. 

Currently the world of consultancy is built around this traditional model, but as new technology is developing, so are the opportunities to build on this framework so that a consultant's focus can return to developing the business rather than discovering what already exists.  

CoPerceptuo is driven by continuous improvement and running consultancy engagements to increase the value of an IT consultants' outputs to your organisation. The application platform guides customers in what data to collect, provides a collaborative mechanism for data collection and makes managing stakeholders in running consultancy engagements themselves much easier. The structured data model and the outputs from CoPerceptuo, enables operational and strategic insight that could only be sought from consultants crawling your organisation, for a fraction of the cost and kept under the control of your internal teams. Check it out here.