How to get the most out of the traditional IT consultancy process...

Nobody likes to feel like they’ve wasted their time or money at the end of a project.  

Currently, though, this is just accepted as ‘part of the process’ in many initial IT consultancy engagements. And here’s why...  

Upon engaging in a traditional consultancy approach, it will often follow this framework:  

• Discovery – discovering various artifacts, documents, and meta data about your IT service, organisation, and operating environment to understand pressures and commitments. 

• Interviews – discussing the current approaches, experiences, and methods of IT service delivery to draw conclusions on performance and opportunities for improvement. 
• Derive conclusions and feedback to you on their findings, recommendations, and next steps. 

The problem with this model is that the majority of their time (and your money) is spent gathering and feeding back information you probably already had access to and maybe knew before engaging them.  

So, how can you get the most out of a traditional consultancy engagement without wasting any more time than necessary learning what you already knew? Here are our 5 top tips to help you get started... 

1. Invest in a dedicated support team.

Because of the nature of coordinating activity within a consultancy engagement and the breadth of data that needs to be collated, it's often a good idea to provide at least 1 full-time person on the project for the discovery process. Their job would be to manage stakeholders in setting up meetings, following up on data requests, and ensuring the data coming in from stakeholders is of a good quality. If they are going to be spending this time creating a baseline for the change in your business, you want to make sure that they have everything they need in order to gather and provide insights that are actually valuable to your change management processes.  

2. Involve as many stakeholders in IT as you can.  

Certainly, as part of the AS-IS discovery of the business, it's incredibly important to engage with your stakeholders at all levels of the IT service. This provides immense value to each of your various different stakeholders; understanding each other's issues and risks they are managing. It's key to ensure business stakeholders are engaged of course for feedback and root cause analysis. But your IT team are the ones who are going to be key to getting on board and getting a consensus on the risks and issues faced to move the strategy forward into something that delivers results. 

3. Set up comms between IT and the businesses stakeholders.

Be really clear on how you're going to position the engagement with the organisation and communicate this in the most effective way for the stakeholders who are critical to getting your project off the ground. This step is key to reducing wasted time and effort for the consultancy in describing what they do when meeting each stakeholder and it means stakeholders come prepared with thoughts in mind as to what they are going to say. 

4. Be clear on the scope, objectives and data your consultants want from you and when. 

Right from the start of your engagement with any consultancy, you need to be clear on what information they'll need and the level of engagement that will be required from you. Typically, the more engagement and data consultants collect, the richer and more accurate of an answer to your problem they will produce. This does require additional effort and complexity to the management of internal stakeholders etc though. Therefore, it's important to be really clear on what this data collection activity looks like and how much effort will be required to get this information by each stakeholder. In addition to this, it's often useful to look early at the sort of data you already have or could share and be clear with the consultancy whether that information will suffice. 

5. Meet with your consultants regularly and get regular updates on their progress.  

All too often we see consultancy engagements that require additional time to complete or simply don't deliver because of the demands on data gathering or left field issues cropping up that takes focus away from the engagement. Because of this, it’s critical to manage and ensure each party is getting what they need from the engagement. This guarantees that the project is kept on track or at least rescoped to ensure the value is being delivered and the stakeholders know what output to expect from the engagement. 

Using your money and time strategically when working with an IT consultant is pivotal to a project's success. So, what if there was a better way to run your consultancy engagements than through this traditional model?  

The CoPerceptuo app has been created to improve the efficiency of consultancy engagements and increase the value of your consultants' outputs. This software has been in development at our sister company, CoStratify, for a number of years now however CoPerceptuo is now in development to tackle these exact problems. The application platform guides customers in what data to collect, provides a collaborative mechanism for data collection and makes managing stakeholders in getting data much easier. The structured data model 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.