Top Eight Reasons Why Consulting Doesn’t Work

Posted by Rick Sklarin on 06/04/07 at 11:41 PM under "Operations and Execution"

Margie Zable Fisher who runs theprsite.com wrote a great blog (that Guy Kawasaki posted on his blog How to Change the World) titled The Top Ten Reasons Why PR Doesn't Work. I have been a management consultant for twenty years and I have delivered hundreds of successful strategy, planning and implementation project for clients. On the other hand, each of us have stories about real clunkers, the consulting projects that went south. Margie’s blog regarding PR deserves a corollary for consulting so here are the Top Eight Reasons Why Consulting Doesn’t Work

1. The target audience for the consulting work is not understood
   When clients and consultants are not clear on the target audience for the output of a project, consultants fail. The basic tenant of good marketing is to have a clear understanding of your target segments and their needs and focus your inbound and outbound efforts on meeting these needs. The same holds true for consulting projects. Both the client and the consultant need to understand: who will “consume” the results of the work; how they will “consume” those results; and how they want to receive the results so that they can most effectively act upon the recommendations


2. "What we've got here is failure to communicate."
   This quote spoken by "The Captain", the imperious prison warden played by Strother Martin, near the epitasis of the movie Cool Hand Luke sums up the most common reason that consulting projects fail. Every consulting project requires some basic blocking and tackling including: scheduled status reviews with all key stakeholders participating; clear lines of communication between consultants and clients; an understanding of how (email/voicemail/blackberry/etc) each participant likes to communicate and receive communications; a well understood process to escalate when things go bad; a mutual agreement and commitment to have open and frequent communications. Yet life can get in the way and when consultants fail you can usually look back and find that the basic communications mechanisms were not in place or functioned poorly
   
   
3. It is not clear when the project is complete
   One of the most obvious and overlooked imperatives is to clearly define when you are done-- to the extreme satisfaction of both the client and the consultant. Consultants and clients fail when they agree to ambiguous work products like "a completed model", a "global market sizing", an "industry evaluation." These terms are so vague that it is highly likely that consultant and client have a different view of what they will deliver and when they are done. When consultant and client hold these different views in their mind the chances of success decrease dramatically.
   
   
4. Client did not understand what they bought and Consultant did not understand what they sold
   How often do clients have a clear understanding of exactly what they will get when a consulting project is finished? Conversely, how often do consultants have one 30 minute meeting with a client, develop a detailed proposal, get approval to begin work and still have no idea exactly what the client wants? I have often tried to show clients exactly what they will get at the end of a project either by sharing the deliverable of a very similar project while extracting the confidential information before sharing. However, frequently, consultants and clients enter into a project each with a clear picture in their mind of exactly what they will get or deliver and yet neither makes the time to put that picture down on paper so the other can say “yes” that is exactly what we are doing.
   
   
5. The explosion of "Credenza-ware" -- failure to land the project with someone who will use it
   When consultants create a final work product that sits in a beautiful binder on the shelf of the client, never to be opened again, that is called "credenzaware". Credenzaware adds no value to any except Acco who produces the binders. Consulting projects that have the fewest tangible results are often completed with the prettiest color, bound, large-volume reports with densely packed text, the exhaustive analysis and some of the most clever insights. Yet if consultants and clients often fail to land the report for success by determining who will received the report, how they will use it, when they will use it, why they will use it and what the results will be from this use.
   
   
6. Expectations greater than budget
   Sometimes what the client wants or needs is much greater than what they can afford. What happens? Sometimes consultants agree to maintain scope but within the reduced budget (I call this consultant value destruction). This leads to a model where the consultant has agreed to do work that does not make sense for them economically. Alternatively, the consultants agree to accept the scope and take it out on their team through evening and weekend work.
   
   
7. Measurements of success not clearly defined
   Simplistically, consulting projects have three outcomes: insight, a plan, or tangible results. Yet clients and consultants are often really bad at identifying and measuring the results of the project. If the project is a research study then the results will be insight such as go/no go decisions on markets, customers, products, opportunities etc. If the project is planning, the tangible result is an implementable plan. If you cannot implement the plan, the project failed. Finally, implementation projects can and should be measured based upon the tangible results delivered such as increased revenue, reduced costs, lower risk and costs of capital etc. Nonetheless ROCI – Return on Consulting Investment – is not a frequently considered metric; what a shame.
   
   
8. Unclear commitments
   The book The Secret is a runaway success partly because it takes the concept of the power of positive thinking and turns it into life commitments.  In consulting, the law of attraction holds equally strong implications. When clients or consultants do not make clear commitments to: proactively participate in project meetings; define timeframes to deliver or review work; provide feedback; communicate; determine when the project is complete; understand what was bought and sold; create useful deliverables; align consultant and clients business needs; define and measure ROCI; consultants fail.

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