Internal Consultants: Your Organization's MVPs

Paul has run a plethora of projects in multiple industries throughout his 20-year career, ranging from process improvement to agile to most recently cyber-security. Paul is also a reputable speaker, drawing practical and humorous conclusions from the "trenches" of his employers. Paul's dedication as a PM practitioner started decades ago, when he became one of the first 10,000 people to earn the PMP.

  Consulting   Organizational Project Management  

It’s spring time, and you know what that means in America? It’s time for baseball—America’s greatest pastime! For those who are enthusiastic about the sport, discussions about who will be the “most valuable player” (or MVP) in baseball will soon get underway. For sure, similar debates will rage in other sports too, which all have their own form of MVP.

We all can relate the MVP concept to the corporate world as well, and for me those who are pushing real change in organizations today have an “internal consultant” dimension to their role. When one thinks of consulting, the external consultant immediately comes to mind—where subject matter expertise, cross-industry awareness, diligence, objective opinions and methodology are all part of the consulting value proposition, (albeit with bill rates to match!).

For sure, there is ample literature on how to work with consultants on the internet and this site, especially given this month’s theme. Yet can the same be said for the unsung heroes of the corporate world today: the internal consultant? Does the lack of a “bill rate” in hard dollars downplay the great value-add they provide to their employers?

I left an eight-year consulting career just as Y2K was wrapping up, and ever since then I’ve been in the FTE world. Even though I don’t work in …

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