Using Consulting Resources Effectively - Part I

You know how it goes...a whiteboard chock full of prioritized strategic initiatives and projects that all need to be implemented this year.  Annual spending budgets may have increased slightly year over year, but certainly not significantly and not keeping pace with business demands.

No longer can your internal business customers wait many months for delivered benefits and results.  The Lifesciences compettitive landscape has only become more and more competitive; patent expirations, generic competition, biosimilars, increased regulatory scrutiny and legal burdens and the higher costs associated with bringing new products and devices to market.

A recent 2012 Accenture Lifesciences industry study states, "The revenue forecasts...reveals how starkly the future prospects have changed for several of the companies over the last three years. The four year forecast (2013-2016) remains low for some companies which continue to struggle to navigate a path back to growth after the worst of the patent cliff. A few even face the prospect of a second round of significant patent expiries and are forecasted to have negative growth. However, several companies are forecast to grow in line with the estimated global market growth of 4-5 percent, having articulated a clear path back to growth and making substantial strategic and operational changes.These companies are adjusting to a “new normal” where profitable growth is still attainable, although harder to achieve." 

Do you have a plan? How will you resource strategic projects this year? This buyer’s guide will assist you in navigating the hazardous landscape of buying consulting services.

Let’s first look at defining your project type.

Project Categories:

Strategy - Architecting new business and IT solutions by shifting previous thinking and adopting new approaches.  Here, our categorization of strategy projects is "pure strategy", it does not include the execution or implementation phases which would later fall into one of the below categories. 

Large Scale Transformational - Efforts attempting to deliver benefits across an entire organization, or multiple business functions simultaneously.  High degrees of business and IT complexity, organizational changes and many moving pieces equates to large:  program budgets, project resources and capital expenditures.

Large Divisional - Delivered benefits intended to impact a single large company division e.g. Research and Development or Sales.  Even the most straight forward implementation will be complex due to size and business criticality. 

Departmental - Vertically organized to produce results that impact specific business functions e.g. Legal, Compliance, Regulatory Affairs.  Smaller in scope and complexity of a Large Divisional program.

Ad Hoc or Incremental - The smallest of the project categories, often used to incrementally build upon previously delivered benefits, for example system enhancements or extensions, and continuous improvements to business processes.

In Part II of this series we will show you a behind the scenes "menu of consulting firms" available to fulfill these project types. 

About Us:

At CompassX we know all about strategy implementation and great project execution excellence.

Learn more: kyleh@compassx.com  |  www.compassx.com | © COMPASSX GROUP, 2013 All Rights Reserved.

Virtual Work for the Project Resource

My first position out of college was working for a big consulting firm, I was allowed to work virtually on some Fridays while engaged on out of town projects.  Since then technology has made virtual work even more effective and easy.  Personally I am a big fan of virtual work when it is appropriate.  In fact, often certain phases of a project can require periods of time where work is better performed remotely.  Take for example authoring a series of functional specifications, these documents require constant un-interrupted focused effort, and project war rooms are not often associated with long periods of quite time.

You will never hear me say an entire project can be run virtually or be tempted to hire a resource who is only available to work virtually.  Business consulting has just too many "high touch" moments when you need to be sat across from your stakeholders and team members.  But there is often flexibility to perform phases or certain periods of work virtually.

When used correctly virtual work can have several benefits: You can pull from a larger pool of project resources, you can keep those resources more refreshed and engaged from potential project burn out and office real estate can be best utilized.

Set the ground rules:

• Understand to work virtually is actually a temporary privilege, one that (if guidelines are followed) continues or ceases to exist altogether if not.
• On-site project or client needs always take precedence over virtual work.  If a big meeting has been moved to Friday, sorry your plans have just changed.
• Extra due diligence is required in planning and scheduling meetings and travel.  Often this requires much more forward planning on the part of the resource who will work virtually.
• Define core working hours where you expect 100% focused at your desk work (e.g. 8am - 3pm)
• Always be accessible.  In this era of smart phones, aside from you having an MRI or being in-flight, be very responsive...very quickly.

Monitor the ground rules:

• Monitor responsiveness to emails, phone calls and instant messaging (especially during the agreed upon core working hours).
• Monitor last minute meeting cancellations, usually it is a sign of poor planning and time management.
• Monitor flexibility on behalf of the virtual project resource when project plans change.
• Weigh the most important aspect, "Is the work getting done?"

About Us:

At CompassX we do a bit of virtual work for our clients, to see how we can help you visit our web site.
You can contact me at kyleh@compassx.com  |  www.compassx.com | © COMPASSX GROUP, 2013