Top 5 rules for consulting

As you may realise from this blog, I’m a Principal Consultant – and that means not only do I work with customers, I also need to lead other Consultants on their journey in consulting. I work with some exceptional and smart people, but the top 5 “rules” for consulting can help people to get into a common mindset.

The Top 5 rules for consulting

These are the top 5 things that I guide consultants on what they need to do;

1. Follow the Brief – or other terms you could apply would be; keep to scope, meet the outcomes & objectives. This is a little bit more than “just do your job”, it means you must ensure that you are achieving that you need to – which can include inherent and assumed areas.
   • Get it in writing, fully clarified and defined – with metrics or specifics. Almost all the projects that I have been involved in that have encountered problems, can all be tied to unclear scope or diverging from the brief. It can also be related to how it was described.
   • If you notice something that is outside of your scope, but could influence what you do, refer to point A below.
2. Know your customer / stakeholder – what do they really want? What is their agenda, and what other problems are they dealing with? This can really be important when the brief / scope is fuzzy or “open to interpretation”. What are their drivers and influences? What sort of end product do they want (document / presentation / MVP), and how would they measure success of your engagement?
   • Have they been asked to decrease costs, increase profitability, cut staff, prepare for a takeover, provide justification for another decisions, etc.
   • How open are they to dramatic change? Do they just want to do it in the same way?
3. Make your customer / stakeholder look good – if you are doing this on behalf of someone else, you want them to be able to go to their superiors and show the high quality work that has been produced, and let them take the credit/kudos. Even if you are doing work for the CEO/Owner of a business, make them look good for making the right decision in hiring / engaging you.
4. Know the business – politics and culture will influence the focus and context of your work
   • Has someone tried this work before, and failed? Is the company risk-averse? Is financial return assessment more important than qualitative benefits? Does business have a policy of no redundancy/staff reductions?
   • Refer to existing information and documents – but don’t just copy them, and in most cases, don’t trust that they are up to date or accurate.
   • Speak to / engage with the workers on the ground – they may well have insights that they have been “complaining to management about for years”.
5. Be prepared for inaction. The work you do may well be shelved or ignored. Unfortunately, some work that is done can be too much of a step for the business to take (which means you did not follow 2 or 4), or can be embarrassing for your stakeholder to release – such as highlighting that they should have already done this, or that they need to shed some staff (which means you did not follow 2 or 3). However, no matter how well you do your report / strategy / architecture / DRP, it may end up just being put on a shelf and not actioned.

Many of these “rules” can also apply to projects, or even just regular work.

Adding extra value

An important next step, to go further, is to add extra value and do a great job. There are lots of ways to do this;

1. Highlight other findings and recommendations that you have encountered that are out of scope – these can be follow-up activities for future work, or just a demonstration that you know what you are talking about.
2. Quote your sources – it’s not just your opinion, link to other studies or research, information from vendors/manufacturers and official locations should be included – preferably as links to websites where they can validate the information that you have provided.
3. Have an image or chart on every page (or slide), not just walls of text. People don’t want to read just pages of text, and will often just skim until they find a heading, table or picture. Make the important parts a picture, table or heading..
4. Exceed their expectations. It’s one thing to just do what you are told (see point 1), but you need to look for a way to exceed their expectations – finding a new piece of information, a new finding from existing information, or presenting learnings in a way that makes it clearer.

The final point is often forgotten – make sure they want to hire you back again (or assign more work to you).