High-Impact Consulting: Making Certain of Client

by Robert H. Schaffer

Billions of dollars are spent every year for internal and external management consulting projects that are inherently loaded against success. Itñs not because of incompetence or malice. The majority of consultants and their corporate clients are eager to produce results. But the conventional model followed by most consultants and clients is simply a low-percentage strategy.

A radically different approach to the use of expert advice, high-impact consulting, has in contrast proven it can produce rapid, certain results. High-impact consulting does more than just provide new solutions and methods. It ensures that each project actually helps clients orchestrate all the changes necessary to achieve measurable results. It also ensures that clients develop their own capacities to sustain and expand progress.

The main reason the traditional mode cannot consistently achieve this high level of results is this: In order to benefit from consulting input, clients not only have to follow the consultantñs direct recommendations; they must also make dozens or hundreds of associated changes. There is a ripple effect of change, and if even a few of these changes are not carried out effectively, the intended results may never occur.

And that happens often. The well-accepted division of labor between consultant (whose responsibility is to provide professional input) and client (whose job is to translate the input into better results) makes frustration much more likely than success. Consider:

Since the consultants assume no direct responsibility for client results, but only for their expert input, they define their work in terms of the products, systems, or reports they will deliver. Naturally, then, they focus on achieving excellence of those products.

To ensure an excellent consulting product, the consultant scopes the project based on the subject to be studied or the problem to be solved. The client's motivation for change and capacity to change are not factored into the design.

That, in turn, usually means a big overall solution that is not matched with what the client organization is able to implement.

Each project entails a sharp division of responsibility between client and consultant. They work in parallel rather than in partnership. That minimizes mutual support and learning.

Since consultants do most of the work on large-scale projects with little client collaboration, clients end up making labor-intensive use of consultants, instead of leveraged use. With these five factors in play, a fine-looking consulting product is ensured -- but one with low probability of successful client implementation. Thatñs why we call them the five fatal flaws of conventional consulting.

With high impact consulting, the five fatal flaws are reversed:

Projects are defined in terms of tangible client results that both client and consultant assume responsibility for achieving.

Since both parties are committed to producing tangible results, projects are carefully tailored to match what the client is willing and able to do successfully. The key is to identify the changes the client is actually prepared to make, and then to structure professional inputs to support those accomplishments.

To further ensure success, large-scale projects are divided into rapid-cycle success steps -- each yielding some measurable benefits as well as developing client capacity and confidence for the next steps.

Clients and consultants work as a partnership, sharing tasks and learning -- both driving for the same results.

With clients actively engaged, and the focus on some rapid results, consultant inputs are exploited in a highly leveraged fashion. The values inherent in this common-sense approach can be exploited both by management consultants and by corporate staff groups charged with improving performance (including finance, human resources and organization development, information technology, logistics and inventory, and strategic planning professionals).

Here are a few examples of how it has been done:

General Electric (GE) Lighting determined it had to reduce breakage costs of fragile lamps. Manufacturing, warehouse, and customer service people had been working on reducing breakage but each within its own group. As part of GE's "Workout" process, an inter-functional team with help from a consultant decided that instead of doing an exhaustive study of hundreds of products and handling points, they would select one product and try to achieve reductions within 60 days. A high-volume and vulnerable product, six-foot fluorescent tubes, was selected. A small group traced the product through a full cycle and suggested using better pallets and space fillers for shipping. Well before 60 days, savings were several million dollars a year. Expenses incurred were minor; fewer than six consulting days were needed and dividends were already rolling in as other product lines were attacked. Similar projects have been successful at General Reinsurance, SmithKline Beecham, and other global organizations.

Avionic Instruments designs and manufactures electronic control equipment for aircrafts. With demand increasing at a radical pace, major improvements in operations and skills were necessary. Rather than a conventional comprehensive study of all operations, which would overload an already stretched-out system, a high-impact approach singled out one product that was more critical than others. A cross-functional team was organized and set a goal to double the product's rate of output in two months. Members worked on resources needed and succeeded. A similar goal for the next two months doubled production again. This sharply focused project developed the insight required to manage expansion of the company's overall output.

A division of Motorola wanted to reduce the cycle time for developing new products. Projects to improve long cycle times are almost always abstract and process-oriented. In this division, however, there were two new products that were almost complete but the danger of serious delays loomed. A consultant helped design a results-focused project to bring those two products to market within 90 days. To achieve this result, the consultant helped the client team test new approaches, including parallel rather than sequential development steps, and tight project control. After targeted results were achieved, the methods were then tried on other products and gradually institutionalized as part of the division's new overall product development process.

At Dun & Bradstreet, dramatic cost reduction carried out while strategic plans were being developed demonstrates you don't have to shift into idle while gearing up for large-scale change that is always off in the future. The best way to prepare for large-scale change is to get moving at once, to carry out some actual changes rapidly and successfully. Internal and/or external consultants can learn to work in a results-focused, highly leveraged mode if there is insistence that they do so.

In high-impact, highly leveraged consulting, there is no limit on speed or scope except those imposed by the client. Large, ambitious goals are divided into shorter incremental steps. These steps are not phases of a single project, but complete rapid-cycle subprojects that go from start to finish quickly and achieve measurable results. This approach produces major improvement and learning that can contribute to large-scale strategic change processes in every kind of organization.

Once a client and consultant shift toward high-impact consulting and enjoy the shared pleasures of achieving real results quickly, neither will want to revert back to the more conventional style.

Robert H. Schaffer is a principal of Robert H. Schaffer & Associates, Stamford, CT. A leader and trainer in the consulting field, he inaugurated and continues to manage a unique workshop for consultants based on his book High-Impact Consulting: How Clients and Consultants Can Leverage Rapid Results Into Long-Term Gains. For further information, go to www.rhsa.com