Consultants – So Many Consultants, So Many Opinions – What is the truth?

Has your firm ever hired a technology consultant or other specialist consultant and after explaining your situation you are given a solution to your specific issue. You may have at that point decided to discuss the situation with another consultant(s) and they give you a completely different solution.

Why is this?

Typically a consultant will have training for a specific industry and / or experience in the industry providing solutions as required. The variable that makes each consultant specific is that that particular individual has had business experiences that may not have been experienced by other consultants.

Think of a fork in the road and your own experiences. Now imagine that fork in the road being your business life experiences. Each time you have made a decision you followed a different fork in the road. Now think hundreds of decisions down the road and hundreds of forks in the road; you will find yourself in a very distant position when compared with a peer that started with you at the same time. When a business issue arises, both yourself and your peer will have a common goal of what needs to be achieved; however, you may have a different approach to achieving that goal. If you’re firm has a specific mandate, of an approach method process to follow, then your approach and that of your peer may be similar; however they will still have differences.

Now enter a consultant.

Consultants are usually only brought in to address issues which fall outside of the typical business operation. The approach that the consultant will recommend is based on all the business life experiences that that consultant has had. If the consultant works with another group of consultants and has agreed with that group to provide similar type solutions, then the approach within that group may be somewhat similar but there will still be slight differences.

So back to the title of this article “So Many Consultants, So Many opinions – What is the Truth?”. Naturally based on the above, you can presume that if you ask the same question of 100 consultants you will get near 100 different approaches with the exception of commonality between most if not the majority.

You may think to yourself .. well this doesn’t help me! And you would be right!

There are a couple of common sense steps that you can use to minimize your exposure and to find the correct solution for your particular issue / firm.

Here are some steps that may be helpful in finding the correct consultant for you:

1) STEP #1: Do your research and collect the contact information for a number of consultants that would have the potential to solve your specific issue. If your issue is very specialized then this list may be very short; let’s assume a bigger list.

2) STEP #2: Review the on-line profiles for your short-list of consultants from step #1. There are a number of online resources that you can use; these are being LinkedIn, Google searches, professional organization profiles and the like.

3) STEP #3: From the narrowed shortlist created in step #2, contact the consultant and ask some generalized questions that would allow you to get some insight into their way of thinking and whether they have the skill sets to address your issue. As well, ask if they have some references that would parallel your specific industry. Contact their references and ask some questions as to whether the consultant has the skill sets and persona that you wish to deal with.

4) STEP #4: From step #3, create a very shortlist of potential trusted consultants / advisors. Contact each consultant and review your specific issue with them. At the end of the review, ask them for a high level approach that they may use to address your issue; note that this will be only a high-level review and details should not be expected in this first meeting with the consultant. If satisfied with their answer, have them provide a formal detailed approach document with a quote if appropriate at this moment for yourself and your firm.

5) STEP #5: Now you will have a number of formal approach documents that can enable you to find a trusted consultant / advisor. After reviewing the documents, you may find a few that will be the best fit for yourself and your firm; depending on your specific issue there may only be one that stands out. A word of advice during the step, try and avoid the bottom line trend that many firms use .. the lowest cost solution is not always the best.

6) STEP #6: Once you have one consultant identified, engage that consultant in the process of preparing to resolve or resolving your issue. During this engagement, you may find that this consultant is not the one for you; if this is the case then hopefully you have a second choice from step #5 and repeat this step #6 again

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7) STEP #7: At this point after engagement, hopefully you now have successfully found your trusted consultant / advisor!

8) STEP #8: IMPORTANT!!! This is a pitfall to avoid! Try to avoid the tendency to go out and ask for the opinions of other consultants whether they are qualified to answer them or not. If you do this, I will guarantee you will find 100 consultants with near 100 opinions and you will start questioning the solution and potentially you will end up back at step #1. This does not mean that you blindly follow this consultant; what it means is that you should evaluate them within your firm and against your own realistic expectations.

I hope that you found this article helpful. As a consultant myself, this article is my own approach which of course may not be the approach of other consultants.

Should you have any questions please feel free to contact me at tony@force12.net.