Why, when and how external consultants are brought onto teams
Getting outside insight is one of the main reasons people hire consultants. Someone from outside the organization can bring new perspectives, additional expertise or provide extra capacity. But how about the consulting teams themselves? When are external people brought into consulting teams?
We asked this question in a little survey that we did late in 2014 and we thought we would share the results here. This was a small survey, n=32, so the numbers are no more than suggestive.
The respondents were mainly management consulting firms, with a sprinkling of systems integrators, professional services groups in larger companies, digital agencies and even a VC firm that provides consulting to its investees (an increasingly popular model). We present overall results and results just for the 17 management-consulting firms that responded.
Hmm, ‘sometimes’ seems like the dominant answer. And there is not much difference between consulting companies and other kinds of project teams.
The most important reason to bring in outside people is for expertise, with scaling up being a distant second. This is true for consultants and for all of the companies surveyed. Comparing management consultants with the other companies, the management companies seem less concerned about costs, perhaps because they pass these on to their clients. In the comments section people added three more reasons: to build relationships, add objectivity and for geographic proximity to the client.
People find outside help through their personal networks. When these don’t work they reach out to formal partnerships with other firms and to former employees (keeping up good relations with former colleagues gives you a business edge). Recruiting companies play little role here. Consulting companies are even more likely that others to rely on their personal networks, they seem to make no use of recruiting firms but they also leverage formal partnerships. The other sources mentioned were client recommendations and sites such as Freelancer.com and Odesk/Elance.
From a small number of respondents, there were pretty emphatic results. People bring external people onto consulting teams primarily when they need their expertise and they find them through personal networks.
People did have a few words of advice on best practices.
“Ensure that they are a strong match and culture fit for the company and they are not just offering a cookie cutter approach that fails to get buy-in. Ensure that you do your due diligence so that whomever is selected is seen and viewed as value added and not as a costly and expensive use of company money. Ensure that as a company you build internal expertise, knowledge, gain insights that can be used after the external resources are gone.”
“Make sure you know them beforehand and that you know they have the same work ethic and support the specific values for individual and team accountability to the client.”
“Must match skill gap, then budget, but also work style, values. Must have a clear communication plan, i.e. who updates whom with what info, accountability guide, how decisions are made etc.”
The common theme is that external consultants need to match the work style and values of the team. This is one reason that personal networks are so important in the search for outside talent.
But as one person told us
“The old models are not going to work in the coming world where we will have to build more teams, build them quickly, and make sure we can scale and adapt rapidly. We need to find a better way forward, but one that is true to our culture.”
Title image: The Animals singing “Inside Looking Out” (Live, 1966)
