consulting

Consultant Roles, Engagements, Et Al

March 7, 2019 General
Consultant and Consultancy

Being an independent consultant isn’t easy, to start with. At the onset, one is answerable to several corporate structures, and being an SME conclusively makes you lonely within a team. It’s obvious, therefore, that the role of a consultant is looked upon with a lot of scepticism, with no less than the legendary Steve Jobs who had his personal take on the topic of consulting.

For some vague reasons, consultants have garnered a notorious reputation for themselves for the misplaced belief in the industry that they do not focus on the outcomes and for “not owning the results”, and costing dollars to the companies for nothing. Quite evidently, that’s not true. While there cannot be any debate on the role & responsibilities of an internal consultant (full-time hire) which is well-defined and aligned with the company’s overarching vision it’s the vast majority of the external consultants working on contracts that come under heavy criticism and undue scrutiny. It isn’t about seeking tangible outcomes alone, but the constraints of budget and time sometimes render the viable goals of the engagement (yes, it’s treated as an “engagement”, short-term or long-term, not a project) out of reach. Consultants, therefore, favour tasks that they feel would clearly deliver the value proposition for the company in the long run. On the other side, companies hire external consultants with the sole purpose of squeezing multiple outcomes in a limited timeframe, expect that consultant deliver practically on the vision which has been laid out, and more so, without justifying the value of the process and the investment in human resources. While the expectation is not completely misplaced, a third-party consultant comes with a fresh pair of eyes and is able to weed out insufficient and incoherent tasks which may not deliver the outcomes the company is striving to achieve. Hence, there might be a review of the processes and team structure to bring the efficiency back. Moreover, outcomes are as achievable and as valuable as the process would be.

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Design Thinking For Organizational Innovation

April 10, 2018 Design

An insightful quote from the Innovation by Design book caught my attention at a local bookstore and luckily I was able to find it on the author’s blog through some rigorous Googling. It gains prominence especially since in my experience, some experts have associated with the design thinking (DT) methodology as a UX design activity referring to its iterative design activities. Hence it was important to make a note of its broader value in innovation here.

The criticality of using DT or ‘human-centred’ design in enterprise software development has been documented in an incisive paper by IBM, but the frameworks also stimulate the transformation journey in combining the organization’s strategic vision involving various inter-organizational initiatives as listed below. Essentially, if you are a practising consultant at the intersection of business design & digital IT in your organization and believe that your role is limited to software consulting, you could expand the scale of your engagements and contribute to the maturity of your institution in more than one ways.

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  • The influence of design thinking at scale on the organization’s culture
  • The creation of new products, services and experiences
  • The design organization processes, systems, and structures
  • The creation and leadership of long-term strategy to distributed innovation
  • The functioning of teams, decision-making and conflict resolution
  • The design of collaborative environments
  • The use of external design thinking experts and consultants
  • The training and development of employees in design thinking

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via How to multiply creativity | Lockwood Resource

Steve Jobs’ Dialogue on Consulting

March 30, 2018 Design Happenings

I came across this germ of discourse from Steve Jobs referring to the consulting industry. In his ridicule of consultants for their lack of experience in the implementation of their projects, there was a strong message for owning and understanding the experience from an end-to-end perspective. He says:

I don’t think there’s anything inherently evil in consulting..I think that..without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one has a chance to take responsibility for one’s recommendations, where one has to see through all action stages and accumulate ‘scar tissues’ for the mistakes and pick oneself up off the ground and dust oneself off, one learns a fraction of what one can. Coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implementation I think is a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better. And so, you do get a broad cut at the companies but it’s very thin, it’s like a picture of a banana, you might get a very accurate picture but it’s only two dimensional. And without the experience of actually doing it, you never get three dimensional.

So you might have a lot of pictures on your walls, you can show it off to your friends like “look I’ve worked in bananas, I’ve worked in peaches, I’ve worked in grapes” but you never really taste it. And that’s what I think. You’re also a variable expense in hard times and you’ll find yourself…(getting fired, is probably what he meant)

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