60 ◾ Odyssey—The Business of Consulting
◾ Giving and receiving feedback as a communications process
◾ Developing responsibility and commercial awareness
◾ Developing a “standard professionalism” across the organization
Phase 2: APC Business—The Business of the Professional Practice
The primary focus of this phase is on marketing, selling, positioning, and
building a profitable professional services business.
APC Business—The Business of the Professional Practice is designed to
help the ACP senior management to develop an understanding of the differ-
ence between the profession of engineering and the business of engineer-
ing. This process will facilitate the recognition of paradigms that help build
the business and those that hinder business success.
Phase 2 will focus on the following:
◾ Marketing strategies that work in a professional practice
◾ Value-based fees and fee setting methods
◾ Three overlapping essentials of high-income results-based professional
services firms
◾ The repositioning paradigm mind-set
◾ Bad business is worse than no business; when to walk away; the causes
of underpricing and all its implications
◾ How to use lateral vision in consultative selling with economic
buyers
◾ Developing strategic selling and ROI selling as an integral part of your
consulting engineering business
◾ The power of “pen” selling, war stories, and the concept sale
◾ Who are the big professional services firms? What do they do well,
and how can you imitate their top performers to transform your
business?
Phase 3: APC Strategy—Strategic Thinking and Planning
The Strategy Model is a seven-step system designed to enable ACP to create
sustainable business advantage and to accomplish personal and business
objectives.
The seven stages in the process are divided between the thinking steps
and the planning steps.
The Odyssey Arrow Integration Phases ◾ 61
The Thinking Steps
Step 1: Current situation analysis
Step 2: Writing up your history
Step 3: Clarifying and ordering your values
Step 4: The power of purpose … crystallizing your mission
The Planning Steps
Step 5: Commitment to a clear vision and critical success factors for the
next five years
Step 6: Writing clear strategic goals for next year and the year after
Step 7: Implementation—tactical planning
The purpose of the thinking part of the ACP strategy model is to discover
innovative, imaginative strategies to create business advantage and success-
ful futures for everyone. The planning part of the model is more operational
and practically orientated. It is also more formal, conventional, and analyti-
cal. Taken together, the seven-step model provides a solid framework that
embodies sufficient latitude and dynamism to adapt to change and make
this document a living process.
The overall objective of the ACP strategy process is to create a long-term
strategic advantage and to maximize the potential of all the resources in ACP
at a time of great change. Everyone within the practice can refer to the ACP
strategy document to facilitate the development of a culture that combines
operational excellence with strategic clarity and focus.
The model keeps everyone involved and focused on achieving a suc-
cessful outcome. Completion is critically important. Getting sidetracked and
failing to complete the process leaves a vacuum that is invariably filled with
cynicism and scepticism. It sends the message that the senior management is
not sufficiently committed to the process to prioritize it.
The consultant’s job in conducting this strategy exercise is to walk the
line between pushing the process and giving enough time for discussion
and dialogue. It is a balancing exercise that requires considerable skill. The
amount of discussion and dialogue will be directly proportional to the own-
ership of and commitment to the final product.
When the process begins, it is primarily a communications, creativity, and
team exercise. This is because most organizations already have the solutions
62 ◾ Odyssey—The Business of Consulting
to their own particular problems hidden in their capacity and knowledge
base. The consultant’s objective is to awaken those dormant solutions and
help create the process that will bring them to bear on the client’s business.
Phase 4: APC Integration—Follow Up and Follow Through
The APC Integration process is an integrated organization-wide program
that needs an internal change agent and champion to ensure that it is imple-
mented deep into the heart of ACP.
The role of this internal consultant/champion is vital to the long-term
success of the ODI. They must take the ownership of the process within
the company. This internal champion will need to be knowledgeable on all
aspects of the business. This means that they will have to move from being
a specialist to being a generalist.
Resistance, even cynicism, is part and parcel of a change process. Making
resistance work for you is a key objective of the internal champion. Helping
to get “early wins”—sometimes individual by individual—is another aspect
of the role played by the internal champion.
Organizational Development Intervention
The ODI is the penultimate phase of the Odyssey Arrow consulting process.
Having made a clear diagnosis and REC, the time has now arrived to make
the assignment happen (Figure 3.2).
For the Odyssey consultant, the ODI stage provides you with the oppor-
tunity to leverage the strong, trusting relationship you have built with the
client and demonstrate, at first hand, the practicalities of your expertise,
intervention frameworks, change processes, solutions, and recommendations.
M1r
M1
REC
M2
BMR
ODI
SER
EB
Figure 3.2 Organizational Development Intervention.
The Odyssey Arrow Integration Phases ◾ 63
Client implementation is the fundamental purpose of any consulting assign-
ment. Whether the problem is IT integration, identifying a new market oppor-
tunity, creating a learning organization or changing the organizational culture,
the ultimate responsibility for implementation now transfers to the client.
Just as a doctor cannot force the patient to take either medicine or advice,
your client must take responsibility for carrying out all of the steps and pro-
cesses specified in the REC. This handover of responsibility is easier said than
done and is best carried out in planned phases, depending on the complexity
and context of the assignment. Being clear about the role the consultant plays
in the client implementation stage is important for both parties.
Summary Evaluation Report
Once the assignment is completed, the final phase of the Odyssey Arrow is all
about staging a successful exit. Having diagnosed, recommended, and imple-
mented in a professional manner, the onus now lies with you, the consultant,
to manage the disengagement in a planned, professional manner (Figure 3.3).
Both the client and the consultant need to be absolutely clear about the
exit strategy; last impressions are often as important as first impressions.
“Slow death withdrawal” or waiting for the client to send goodbye signals is
unprofessional and serves neither party well.
Writing an SER outlining how the assignment has met its objectives is the
essence of a professional exit. The client needs to know that a project was a
success and to hear the words “Here is the evidence to justify the resources
invested on the process.” In essence, the SER is your statement of value pro-
vided to the client.
Human performance improvement interventions and cultural change
management strategies are inherently difficult to evaluate, but that evalua-
tion should not be disregarded by the consultant. A professional evaluation
M1rM1
REC
M2
BMR
ODI
SER
EB
Figure 3.3 Summary Evaluation Report.
64 ◾ Odyssey—The Business of Consulting
exercise, which indicates how a gap has been closed, how a cost has
been eliminated, how time has been saved, how a sales metric has been
increased, how an activity has been engaged in, or how productivity and
profit have been improved, is the best way to close off the assignment.
The SER report outlines the outcomes and may suggest some ongoing
recommendations as value-added advice or service for the client. The SER
terminates the consulting assignment.
Odyssey in Action I
Ron Price, Price Associates, Boise, Idaho
It’s Not a Product, It’s a Partnership
I went through Odyssey in April of 2006. At the time, I had just started hav-
ing a conversation with a company about a succession management project.
Historically, in that context, I would automatically have thought of a product
of some kind, a job benchmark or something of that nature, but because of
my experience with Odyssey, I slowed down, I took a step back. I wanted to
try to understand the significance of this project as it fitted into the big pic-
ture. So I flew out to meet with the CEO and his team. I spent half a day with
them, and all but thirty minutes of that half-day was about listening to them,
nothing more. I wanted to understand their situation. I wanted to operate on a
much deeper level than I had ever tried to operate before.
I realized right away that I needed to get away from thinking about the spe-
cific details at the beginning—we can always get to the details later—I needed
to step back and understand the big picture: What have they tried in the past,
and if it didn’t work, why didn’t it work? What’s the real impact of this particular
issue? What’s the emotional impact of this issue on the team? I realized that if I
took the time to do all that and I wasn’t anxious to rush out a proposal, I would
develop a much better picture of what was going on. I would be able to help
them see an opportunity not as a transaction but a transformation.
Towards the end of my time with them, I began to see what could be
done with this client, and it was something that reached far beyond any par-
ticular product or workshop. They asked me, “Well, do you have any idea of
what it would cost for you to help us with this?”
I told them that what they needed was not a product, it was a partner-
ship. I said that I’d have to put pencil to paper, but my first thought was
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