Getting Value From Consulting

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Consulting  

I’ve been a consultant for the last two decades, most of that time running my own firm. So it should be one of the easier topics to write about, right? But it’s actually very difficult. It’s hard to be completely objective about something that has been my livelihood for most of my career, and something that I am heavily engaged in on a continuous basis.

I’ve decided to embrace that perspective, to acknowledge up front that I may not have the most objective views, but to share with you my thoughts and beliefs around consulting in the project arena. I want to start with some basics and look at what consulting is (and isn’t), and how it should drive value for everyone involved with it.

Consulting is different from contracting
For many people, “contractor” and “consultant” are used interchangeably, but they are very different. Contracting is associated with the execution of a piece of work; consulting is about helping an organization to change (improve) how they work. An individual may spend some of their time contracting—managing a project in exchange for a fixed fee or an hourly rate, for example—and some of their time consulting.

With contracting, organizations should have no expectation that their ability to deliver work in the future will improve. That may happen—I know of many project managers …

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