3 Keys to Successful Consulting Engagements

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  

In my couple of decades of consulting, I have come across a lot of different organizations with a lot of different approaches to consulting engagements. To protect the guilty, some of those stories had best stay in my head, but there are a few things that I feel I can share to help organizations set themselves up for success when pursuing a consulting engagement.

1. Know what you want, or get help to find out
A consulting engagement is another form of discretionary investment—just like any other form of project. It’s a commitment of money, and likely time and effort from organizational resources, to achieve an outcome. That outcome either cannot be achieved without outside help, or the use of outside consulting will enable more benefit to be achieved more efficiently.

So, just like any other proposed project, organizations must start by defining what it is that they want to achieve—the benefits or business outcomes that are needed, how they are going to measure whether that success has occurred, and how much they are willing to invest in order to secure that benefit. In my experience, that doesn’t always happen.

That’s probably not too much of a surprise. We can all think of projects that have been approved in organizations without clear expectations of how they will benefit the business, and consulting engagements are no different.

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