7
Managing Consulting Projects
| Q: | How can I manage the consulting responsibilities? |
| A: | Manage a flexible, repeatable process for consulting. |
In this chapter, you will learn how to:
• Determine the tasks that need to be done by the project manager and those that should be done by a developer (which might be the same person).
• Build a project charter to document business objectives, learning objectives, scope, risk, and constraints.
• Choose appropriate tasks to manage for a consulting effort.
Consulting (coaching, facilitating, mentoring) adds useful tools and techniques to our ability to create learning demonstrated by behavioral change. But moving from the role of a trainer, developer, or facilitator to that of a consultant is not an easy task. Consulting work requires a different set of skills, including the ability to facilitate, negotiate, manage conflict, solve problems, and listen. In chapter 3, you learned about many approaches to course development and the tasks that have to be managed in developing a learning experience. Similarly, the skills required for project management and development are essential components of consulting; the process is different, but the core competencies are similar.
If anything, the time pressures of consulting are more extreme. When a supervisor is looking for help with a performance problem, there is not a lot of tolerance for analysis time. Consultants must be able to move quickly through, but not neglect, an analysis of the problem, and then partner with the customer to create a solution. Trust your instincts and your experiences. You will often see situations that you have seen before. Try not to jump to a solution, but rather, learn how to ask the right questions to make sure you are heading to the right conclusion.
The notion of planning a project implies that you know you are doing the right project in the first place. If the project charter cannot be completed, the consulting project must never begin. You must have a thorough understanding of the client’s business need.
This chapter describes a method for consulting for any size situation. You will learn about creating a rational plan and working back from the date.
Creating a Rational Plan
Figure 7-1 shows a model for consulting. The PACT Model (plan, analyze, create, and transition), as in “Make a PACT with your business customer,” ensures that:
• appropriate analysis of the problem occurs before the solution is created
• ownership of the performance improvement remains with the business customer through partnering
• external and internal work is carefully balanced for effectiveness.
Figure 7-1. The PACT Model
Step 1: Plan
The plan step of the PACT model overlaps a great deal with the define phase of the Dare Approach. Notice that the only significant difference is that you create performance objectives instead of learning objectives, although the approach is similar. Refer back to chapter 2 for more information about creating objectives. The important points to remember are the ABCDs of objectives: audience, behavior, condition, and degree (depending on the learning domain).
The performance objectives are important because after a solution has been implemented, they will be the criteria used to measure the success of the initiative. The solution may contain one or many tasks, such as training, process redesign, reward structure redesign, and organizational design. Individually, each task often will not be sufficient to improve performance, but implemented together, they create a systemic approach to meeting the performance goals. It is vital that the performance objectives be clearly measurable and agreed to by the client; for example, “After the performance improvement project, the sales staff will increase sales of our new line by 15 percent in the first year.”
Step 2: Analyze
This is the step in which the initial detective work is done. A careful analysis must be completed to ensure that the symptoms are mapped correctly to problem causes. Without that, the wrong problem might be tackled. Consider the following questions that must be answered:
• What is the perceived performance gap?
• What would the performance look like if it were improved? How would one measure that improvement?
• What are the people issues that are preventing improved performance?
• What are the organizational issues, including reward and appraisal processes, that are preventing improved performance?
• What are the technology issues preventing improved performance?
A good way to gather this information is through a combination of group and individual interviews. Here is a sequence that works well and quickly:
1. Distribute a letter from the budget client to all the stakeholders explaining the goal of the project. Request that the managers attend a one-hour initial data-gathering session. Distribute with this letter the questions to be discussed so that participants have time to think about responses.
2. Hold the one-hour meeting and discuss the answers to the questions through standard facilitation techniques. You will not get much good data here, but you will quickly see where the power in the organization lies by the behavior of this group. Explain the problem and ask the group to sign up their staff and themselves for a 20-minute, one-on-one follow-up interview during a three- to five-day period a few weeks later. You can call these “doctor is in” sessions.
3. Invite the administrative assistants of the organization to lunch, and ask them the same questions. Administrative assistants know everything, so you will get good information from them. Treating them with respect by buying them lunch will upset the status quo and help motivate people to get to the 20-minute interviews, just to find out what is going on.
4. Hold a one-hour group meeting for the executive management similar to the one held for the managers. Again, note the behavior in the room to better understand the power base.
5. Schedule phone calls or visits (if possible) with some key customers to hear their perception of the issues.
6. Hold the “doctor is in” sessions.
These are some of the tasks that would make up the project schedule for the PACT analyze step. As you gather this information, it is essential that you remain neutral. As you hear from more and more people, you must fight the urge to jump to conclusions or pick sides. It is important to capture all the information and synthesize it so that all views are represented. As the final results are published, create a table rating each issue’s importance, according to the number of people whom you have heard express each issue.
Clearly, the only way to be effective at an undertaking of this magnitude is by careful project management. The logistics of scheduling, attending, and summarizing multiple meetings to gather this data can be complex. Fortunately, you know how to build a project charter and project schedule to facilitate the success of a consulting project.
Step 3: Create
In the create step, the clearer understanding of the problem is translated into a solution. The performance consultant must facilitate this process with the people who will be responsible for implementing that solution. New processes and strategies created exclusively by a consultant are rarely, if ever, successful. For ownership to occur, the people affected must be actively involved.
As you begin to work with these groups (or task forces), scheduling and time commitment become a huge problem. Again, it is important to manage this work as specified in chapter 5. Surprise glitches and delays are common when you are working on projects like these, especially when analysis is threatening to some of the stakeholders.
Step 4: Transition
Although many people like to think that a consulting project is finished once the solution has been implemented, that is never the case. The transition to the new solution is the toughest part of the project. This is where all the underground currents of fear and anxiety surface to become weapons of destruction. A consultant must fill the project management role, and be vigilant at this time to keep the project moving forward, although sometimes it will feel more like you are keeping it from sliding backward.
Working Back From the Due Date
Most consulting projects start with a fixed due date. People who have admitted to problems do not have a lot of time to wait for a solution. Even if the problems have existed for months or years, understanding the magnitude of the problem because of your analysis work accelerates the desire for resolution.
In the performance consulting world, you don’t have unlimited time and resources to finish a project. Instead, you have to work backward and use the time you have. To budget your time appropriately, use this percentage breakdown based on the PACT steps:
• plan: 10 percent
• analyze: 40 percent
• create: 30 percent
• transition: 20 percent.
This breakdown makes it easier to allocate the amount of time you have for each phase. For example, if you have been given six calendar months to finish a project (which is roughly 120 working days), the work breaks down like this:
• plan: 12 days (2.5 business weeks)
• analyze: 48 days (10 business weeks)
• create: 36 days (7.5 business weeks)
• transition: 24 days (5 business weeks).
Remember, this breakdown is based on duration, not effort (see chapter 4 for a discussion of the difference between the two).
Another word of warning: It will be tempting to rush into the create phase as fast as possible, shortchanging the plan and analyze phases. At first, skimping on planning and analyzing will seem to buy you a lot of time to get the “important” work done. Ultimately, however, you will end up creating a solution that is based on an incomplete understanding of the problem, or worse, you will create the wrong solution entirely. This will become painfully evident when you hit the transition phase and everything blows up. At this point, you will be forced to return and analyze after the fact, and it will probably take much longer because of stress and time pressures on both the consultant and the client. This pattern constantly repeats itself in projects, and it is so insidious that even experienced project managers fall victim time and time again.
Summary
In this chapter, you read about how to apply the same project management techniques that enable you to develop learning experiences to performance consulting work. Performance consulting resembles learning experience development, but it has some fundamental differences. Table 7-1 summarizes the information presented in the chapter.
Like learning experience development, consulting engagements are not easy. No silver bullet will effectively eliminate all the problems that may occur. The best defense is to carefully plan and manage the project through flexible, yet structured, project management.
Table 7-1. Comparison of Learning Experience Development and Performance Consulting
| Characteristic | Learning Experience Development | Performance Consulting |
|
Creeping scope |
Some pressure |
High pressure |
|
High political risk |
Some |
A lot |
|
Difficult to schedule |
Limited difficulty |
Multiple schedules conflict, usually more clients |
|
Stakeholder pushback |
Limited |
Frequent |
|
Time constrained |
Somewhat |
Highly constrained |
Practical Exercise
Exercise 7-1 presents a scenario for a performance consulting engagement. Create a project charter and project schedule for this project, leveraging the PACT model to identify the tasks and dates in the project schedule. The purpose of the exercise is to plan a performance consulting project to see the difference between it and a course development project.
Exercise 7-1. Some Practice for Performance Consulting Project Management
You are part of the HR department at a large utility company. You have been called in to talk to the employees of a new subsidiary, Power Surge, that your company has been developing in an attempt to have a more diversified business when deregulation hits in a few years. This subsidiary has been marketing surge protection devices to existing customers for more than a year. Sales have not grown as quickly as the company had hoped, and the CEO has asked you to go in, look things over, and report back about what should be done. He confides in you that he suspects that the salespeople need training, but is interested in hearing what you find out. He agrees that you will need to interview all the employees in the organization, which include a president, two vice presidents, a manager and four staff in the sales department, a manager and three staff in accounting, and a manager and five staff in technical support. Information technology support, human resources (including training), and marketing development are currently “bought” from the parent company through charge-back. The CEO must have your answer in one month because he must make a recommendation to the board about the viability of this subsidiary at the company’s annual board meeting a month and a half from now.
You will not be responsible for implementing any of your recommendations, but you must propose a business case for the solution. You will not have anyone else helping you with this project, and you will be dedicated to it full time between now and then. Consider the following:
• What are the business objectives?
• What are the performance objectives?
• What is the scope of this project?
• What is the risk?
• What are the constraints?
• What is preventing the growth of the Power Surge subsidiary, according to the people in the organization and some of its customers?
• Is it a good investment strategy for the parent company to continue to invest in this venture? If yes, what types of investments should be made?
Consider what tasks should be planned. Here are some sample tasks:
1. Create an initial letter that will introduce the project from the CEO.
2. Distribute the letter to everyone in the organization with an invitation to the meetings that will be held.
3. Create the project charter.
4. Schedule a one-hour meeting with the three middle managers.
5. Hold a one-hour manager meeting.
6. Follow up with meeting notes and a “doctor is in” schedule after the manager meeting.
7. Schedule a lunch meeting with the two administrative assistants.
8. Hold the lunch meeting.
9. Follow up with specific logistical needs for your “doctor is in” meetings.
10. Schedule the “doctor is in” meetings.
11. Hold the “doctor is in” meetings.
12. Schedule three key customer meetings (phone or live).
13. Hold three key customer meetings.
14. Follow up with notes from key customer meetings and thank-you letters.
15. Schedule a meeting with key contacts in IT, HR, and marketing.
16. Hold the meeting with IT, HR, and marketing.
17. Follow up with notes from IT, HR, and marketing meetings and thank-you letters.
18. Synthesize results.
19. Create a document of the existing situation.
20. Create a prioritized table of proposed solution sets.
21. Do rough cost-benefit analysis for each proposed solution.
Think about the tasks that you will need to do, then create a critical path network and Gantt chart:
• What tasks will you need to do to deliver a report in one month?
• How long will each task take?
• What will the schedule look like?
Figure 7-2 shows a sample scope diagram for this project. In this case, a critical path network is not necessary because only one person is working on all the tasks, meaning that there is only one project path. A timeline or Gantt chart would be more useful.
Figure 7-2. Sample Scope Diagram for Hypothetical Consulting Project
Figure 7-3 is an example of the time allocated for the tasks according to the PACT model algorithm, working back from the due date. Figure 7-4 is a worksheet showing the amount of risk involved in this project according to the formula described in chapter 2.
Figure 7-3. Sample Breakdown of Time Allocated for Consulting Tasks According to the PACT Model Algorithm
Figure 7-4. Worksheet Showing the Amount of Risk Involved in This Project
Each category is given a risk value of 1 to 10, with 10 representing the highest amount of risk.
