What do you want from a consultant?
There’s lots of reasons for engaging a consultant.
It may be because you just need a piece of work done fast and done well but you don’t have the organisational capacity to turn the job around quickly. You need someone you can trust who will get to know the brief quickly, come up with a process that meets your needs and can implement the plan to deliver your policy, strategy, business case or report on time and budget.
We’ve all been frustrated by bureaucracies. Sometimes you need someone who’s worked inside large organisations to help you to navigate the best possible path to minimise the paper work and red tape (or just do the hard slog of meeting the requirements of the red tape and bureaucracy). Or perhaps you need someone with insight and understanding to develop initiatives that cut through the bureaucratic inertia and can deliver real results.
On other occasions you may have felt that your negotiations with stakeholders or internal team conversations were going around in circles, that you’re stuck and can’t move the conversation forward so that you have genuine unity of purpose or have made a real decision that will last. That’s when you may need someone with the experience, credibility and tools to work with you and your team to break out of that log jam and make a decision or plan that has authenticity for you and all of your stakeholders.
And sometimes there’s a problem or issue that needs exploration or solution development but it’s difficult for people associated with your organisation to lead a process that truly gets to the heart of the matter. An independent management consultant can help by utilising an approach that you (or your team) have co-developed and authorised while bringing impartiality and integrity to that process.
Maybe your consumers have told you that a particular program or policy just isn’t delivering the change or outcomes that are really needed by them and you are grappling with how to redesign that program or develop a new policy drive real change. A consultant can be a short-term member of your team to drive and catalyse that design or improvement process.
Or perhaps your team just doesn’t have the requisite skill set available for a particular piece of policy development, program implementation or review.
I love working with teams, particularly when they are seeking to tackle impossible issues or deliver lasting positive change for the everyone in our community. If any of the above sounds like your organisation please give me call to discuss how I can help.