Whatever the case I know exactly when I did realize that I had a problem. I was driving in my car on my way to a client meeting. Playing on my CD player was the book "Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth In Your Corporation" by James Womack and Daniel Jones. Needless to say I was driving alone.
For those of you not familiar with this book what I will tell you is this. It was in 2005 while reading this book for the first time, sitting in an airplane some 30,000 feet in the air, that I experienced a paradime shift in my professional life. Everything I had learned and put into practice about improving processes suddenly fell by the wayside. And I could immediately see as clear as the words on the paper how Lean Principles could be successfully applied in any organization, on any process, by any group of motivated people.
But enough preaching, this is about me and my problems.
So back to me driving in my car listening for the dozenth time or more how every journey of Lean begins with identifying what it is that your customers Value. And suddenly I had a terrible thought: "I have no idea what it is that my clients Value."
Don't get me wrong. I have completed many successful "improvement" projects in many organizations that have resulted in many satisfied customers. But that wasn't my problem. My problem was, even though I told myself and my clients every day that I was "unique and special" and my firm's approach to organizational improvement was "unique and special," the fact was I was doing management consulting basically the same way I had been taught to do it by the first consultants I had ever worked for. And they in turn were doing it the same way they had been taught, and so on all the way back to Drucker.
To illustrate my point let me give you a brief summary of how to deliver a 'typical' implementation based management consulting project. This will contrast to what 95% of consultants do which is write reports filled with recommendations, leaving the actual implementation of changes to the clients themselves. But for the less than 5% of us who actually stick around to work with our clients to implement improvements it goes something like this...
- Sales Meetings: Conduct a series of 'sales' meetings with as many people as you can within the client's organization to collect as much information on issues as possible. Introduce the client to as many impressive, well dressed, and extremely intelligent people from your firm as possible. The more war stories these people can tell the better. And if the stories even remotely relate to the potential client's organization, better still.
Try to piece together the actual decision making process and available consulting budget. Hopefully ultimately identify the one person within the organization with the authority to make the necessary purchasing decision. Book a meeting with that person and then beg for the opportunity to come in and conduct a targeted organizational review and present a project proposal.
- Project Proposal: Now that you have passes to the building, albeit temporary passes, the next step is to bring in as many consultants from your firm as possible. You want to bombard the client's organization with every conceivable form of analysis and data chugging imaginable. And then pull a series of all-nighters (the more the better) so as to put together and present as compelling (and coffee-stained) a proposal as you can.
The challenge here is to free up people within your firm who are both brilliant and seasoned enough to be able to quickly evaluate a potential client's situation, while at the same time are somehow made available by your Operations group who are busy billing existing clients for every warm body they can put their hands on. For those of you outside of the consulting industry this particular contradiction has caused internal battles within consulting firms starting from the first time Drucker's lead analyst requested resources from Operations to help sell his firm's second project.
- Improvement Project: Assuming your over-worked and over-paid analyst was able to convince the potential client to become a current client the fun really begins. If the people within the client organization were impressed by the level of study, scrutiny and analysis conducted before the project started, the level of intensity demonstrated by the on-site project team is enough to blow their minds. Fueled by the ever-present fear of having the project canceled, the project team (proudly) works 20 hour days or longer to prove that they are worth every penny of the huge invoices submitted to the CFO week after week.
Of course the first thing to do is place the studies completed during the analysis phase aside and start from scratch. To make matters worse, since there is typically anywhere from a few weeks to a few months between the presentation of the project proposal and the start of the project, chances are high that no one from the project team will have been involved in the proposal phase. As one colleague of mine appropriately put it ".... it must seem like Groudhog Day for the client." He is referring of course to Bill Murray's character who wakes up over and over again to the same day only to discover that he is the only one who realizes that it is the same day. Rent it if you have time.
And so the project progresses. Lean principles and many other proven techniques are gradually implemented within the client's organization. Here the causes for delays tend to rest with the client resources themselves and not the consultants. In most cases the consultants must compete for Subject Matter Expert's attention along side all the day to day operating issues that come up. Only in rare cases does the client assign full-time resources to the project. More often these hardworking individuals end up working long hours to cover off their regular job, in addition to the demands of the consulting project. This lack of direct involvement also leads to more work for the consultants. Because they are the only ones conducting the studies and analysis it becomes a major challenge to convince the client as to what improvement should be made. Fortunately management consultants develop spectacular and truly innovative ways to present complex concepts and ideas. The purpose of these is to ultimately convince the client, who is too busy dealing with day-to-day issues, that major changes need to be installed.
But in the end at least some of the changes are made, in most cases the results are achieved, and the project is successful. There are usually a few dinners or nights out to celebrate the end of the project and say 'good-bye' to new friends and colleagues. Then the printers and power bars are packed up and the project team moves on to their next assignment.
- Sustaining the Results: The final step in the consulting process is an odd one. What makes it odd is that most management consultants will tell you that the sustainability of their results is the single most critical aspect of every engagement. In fact I challenge you to find company literature for an implementation based firm that does not describe in great detail how sustainable their results are. And to prove this they will trot out lists of satisfied past clients who will attest to just that.
However at the same time the reality for most firms is that almost no effort is spent ensuring the sustainability of results once the printers and power bars have been packed up. Remember everyone involved in the project moves on to their next grueling engagement with 20 hour days trying to convince a new CFO to pay their invoices. Even if they wanted to there is little or not time or energy left over to ensure sustainability of their past projects.
If asked, most consultants will sheepishly admit that they may exchange emails with former clients from time to time. But the reality is, the more time that passes from the end of a project, the more every one of us shudders at the thought of a prospective client calling up a past client to see "how things are going."
This was very well demonstrated after I recently posted the question "What do our clients value?" in a Lean Six Sigma discussion group on LinkedIn. I was bewildered and bemused at the overwhelming number of responses from highly intelligent (and presumibly successful) management consultants who tried to coach me on how to be a Lean Management Consultant. It was only a very few who understood my question and attempted to define the Value we provide.
When you consider how these people (and me for that matter) make money it makes sense. The larger the consulting project the more money you can charge. As one colleague put it; "why would you want to do a project in less time and for less money?" Wow. Can you imagine Toyota (or any firm for that matter) deciding to maximize Revenue by leaving as much Waste in their processes as possible?
I know, right?
So there you have it. They say the journey of 10,000 miles begins with a single step. And the first step to solving a problem is admitting that you have a problem. Houston we have a problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment