We talked about this earlier, but projects come in all kinds of purpose, shapes, and sizes. You'll have some projects that might be really short, like an assessment, your job is to diagnose the situation, not fix it. There's also a situation where not only are you going to find out what's wrong, but the client wants your help in actually rectifying it. In the picture here you can see that an assessment sounds like, we believe that XYZ is something that you should do versus an implementation which is, this is going to take three years to get done, you should do this and we will do X and Y. What I'd like to do is talk about generically the different parts of a project. You know what to expect. No matter how long a project is, whether it's three months or three years, they're all going to have a start, they're all going to have a middle and they're all going to have an end. Intuitively, makes tons of sense. What I did was I drew out here just basically eight weeks. The idea in the early days, it's around organizing yourself, the work, setting expectations with the client and how easy or hard this is going to be and what they might need to do. The middle star, like you might imagine, is just to check in. We're at the halfway point of the marathon, we've ran 13 miles, we have another 13 miles to go. This is what you need to be aware of. Once again, setting expectations. Consultants consistently set expectations to make sure that you have a good chance of exceeding them. Then finally towards the end, this is project-based work, which is different than when you're working in finance in a company and then you have a financial close every three months. These have a start, a middle, and end, and then you're on to another project. Let's assume that it is an eight-week assessment just to make it simple. The question is, what are the typical activities, what would you be doing? Then at what point would you be doing them? Then finally, the deliverable? What does a client get? What should they expect? What I'll do is I'm showing these pretty red stars with numbers on them to give you an idea of what are the four or five type of activities and milestones that we see. The first one here, you'll see it's a week 0, and I did that deliberately. It's not even week 1, it's week 0, which is to say, the project hasn't officially started. We haven't billed any time to the client. It may be that you're not even at the client site. As you might imagine, we are at the proposal stage, you're really figuring out what is the work that's going to be done, who needs to be involved and frankly, what would success look like? I said that one thing that external consultants are pretty good at, almost to a fault, is that they make sure that they understand the scope. In other words, they're not going to take on a project that's ambiguous or they're not sure what it is. Sometimes, this time here, week 0 can actually last months. For one project that I did not too long ago, the sales process lasted about six months because they said they were interested, I gave them a proposal. They disappeared for two months, they came back, they asked for something, I revised the proposal and then they disappeared for two more months, and then they came back. What says zero can actually be quite long, but for us on the consulting side of it, we want to know what needs to get done and then perhaps really important, if you are part of a bigger firm, who's going to be staffed on this project? Because you might recall in a previous module, we talked about how staffing is difficult. We think that it's going to start on January 22nd, but if it doesn't, then all of a sudden, staffing is very difficult. Number 2, we are finally at the kickoff presentation. This is the fun part of it where we get everybody around a table, we have a kickoff presentation and we're sharing with the client what we think this project might look like. This timeline here, week 1 through 8 is something we would show during the kickoff. We want to set their expectations of what's going to happen, who needs to do what? Frankly, really good projects are not just the consultant doing hard work by themselves, but it's a pretty good division of labor where the client, they're doing things that either are not worth the consultant's time or require a lot of stakeholder management. Where an outsider coming in doing this is inappropriate. Think of a kickoff presentation as a wedding. Typically it's a lot of smiles and it's a lot of positive enthusiasm and inertia with the hope that this eight-week project will go very well. I will say that one thing that experienced consultants tend to do, they like to have the client excited, of course. Who doesn't want to have a client that's eager to help out? But they also want to make sure that the client realizes that there's no free lunch, that the consultant is going to ask the client to do things, provide data, reach out to folks, in other words, hold up there half of the bargain for this project to work. Real consulting pros, they are a little bit centered, grounded, and they make this event a little bit more serious. Yeah, it's a wedding and it's great to start this adventure together but then they also give them a little hint of warning saying that, "Hey, this is going to be tough and there are parts of this journey of eight weeks when you are not going to like me, the consultant, because I'm going to ask very difficult things of you and I'm going to nag you when you don't do them." As a tip here at the bottom, a lot of the ingredients that were in the statement of work or their proposal can literally be copy and pasted into the kickoff presentation, which makes sense because the statement of work is the contract between you and the client. You are agreeing on this and they're going to pay you for it, and so you take that agreement and you put it on a PowerPoint slide and you show it for a lot of different people to see. Not just the client executive, but maybe the client executive's boss, maybe the client executive's peers in other departments. Basically, this is your chance to be very clear about what's going to happen during these eight weeks. Between Week 1 and 4, you're going to have a lot of consultants working very hard. We're not going to talk about all the hard work that's done in the hotel in the weekends, in the evenings. Number 4 is your chance to check back in. We had this big kickoff where we had a lot of people around a board table getting excited, it was the wedding, but now we're at the halfway point. Like it says here in the title, this is your chance as a consultant to wave the red flag that we have a problem. It might be that the data hasn't come in. It could be that some of the people that you were going to interview are avoiding you and they're not returning your calls. It could be that you discovered something that's actually a problem. You're looking through the financials, you're looking through the data, and you have an issue that they need to correct fairly immediately. This is, once again, maybe a little bit of the difference between a junior consultant and a more senior experienced consultant? There was one senior manager that I worked for who always insisted that during the check-in meeting in the middle of the project, that it could not be all green, in other words, you have to identify at least one problem that you need the client's help to solve, and so you might think, well, John, aren't you being a little bit of a cry baby in basically getting the client involved when it might not be needed? The answer is yes and no. The reason why that might not be true is that there are always things going a little bit wrong in the project. In 15 years of consulting work, I don't think I've ever had a project that was a 100 percent smooth. We need to make sure that we create this very honest and objective relationship with our clients where we can be very honest and say, "Hey, this is something that frankly we thought it would be done, and so it not being done is an issue in the project. What can I do as a consultant to help you essentially meet your side of the bargain?" I said a lot of things and I think it really sums down to the idea that you want to set expectations and you want to continually build trust. You building trust with the client isn't just agreeing with them all the time and saying yes. We'll talk about it later, but actually saying yes, can actually get you in trouble as a consultant. The last tip here is, what do executive status reports look like? Are they very formal affairs? Do you have 30-page PowerPoint decks? They can be, but what I find is, usually an executive status report is just one or two pages. It's literally just one page where we highlight the most important things and it's an opportunity to give the executive a little flavor of things are going well or not well and typically also giving them a little homework on how they can help you. Well, we're definitely getting towards the end of this project at this point. We are in week 7 of 8. A lot of work was done. We had a hypothesis, some of which were true and some which were not true and we're making our way through it. The focus of this is the word pre-wiring at the very top left. What is pre-wiring? It's the idea that before you go to the final presentation in Week 8, you want to make sure that you got rid of all the drama. You want to show the final presentation to the important people, the key decision-makers, the influencers, or even people you think are trouble. Not a trick question. In the final presentation, do you want the troublemakers to say something controversial and be offended and prevent the final presentation from going well? Absolutely not. The reason you pre-wire is you're walking the halls of the client site and you're sharing with them like, "Hey, Timmy. I know that you had some concerns about this portion of the project and even though maybe we didn't agree perfectly, this is what we're going to be showing tomorrow." That gives Timmy a little bit of opportunity, one, to manage their expectations so they don't see it for the first time in that very public setting, and then two, it gives Timmy a chance to give some feedback. Timmy might say, "Well, you and I do disagree. I don t think that's the best approach. However, if you are willing to change your PowerPoint to say this, I will be okay during that meeting." It's a little bit of a negotiation, it's a little bit of signaling, it's a little bit of peacemaking and brokering. It's all those things. Really the main point is that you don't want anybody to be surprised in that final presentation. One of my mentors used to say, never have a meeting in a meeting. The real meeting should have happened long before that privately in that client's office so that when you have the big meeting, everybody essentially is nodding their heads and helping you think about the future not being obstructionist and difficult. One fun piece of, I guess "jargon" in "business jargon" in Japanese, they call pre-wiring Nemawashi. It's to say Nemawashi. It's the idea that we try to make it easy in the final presentation for people to agree. Here we are. We are at the checkered flag using the race car analogy. It's the final lap, we're almost done. What does success look like? Success looks like obviously the client not being surprised, we talked about that. Number 2, looking through the statement of work and what you said you would do, you did. Then what really beautiful looks like is the client coming around to your side of the table, metaphorically, and thinking with you how to either implement these recommendations or what the next piece of work could be. No surprise, consultants love it when clients ask them to stay. Maybe we're just insecure, who knows? But more business is a huge vote of confidence. A great final report might sound like, thank you for the great work. I know it wasn't easy, but you've really given us the confidence to take some action, and based on what you recommended, we think option number 2 is a smart way to go. Let's talk about how you and I, the consultant and the client, can actually make that happen. One thing that you might hear a lot nowadays is the word design thinking. It sounds very fancy. But the fundamentals, I think are very similar to what consultants have been doing for 50 years. Not that different. But one part of design thinking which I really appreciate and I think it's useful is this thing at the bottom. Which is, we should really try to reverse engineer how the client should feel, F-E-E-L at the end of this meeting. It might vary. If the client has to make a very tough decision, like maybe laying off people, you don't expect them to feel happy because who's going feel happy about that? No one. But you might want them to feel a little bit less scared that it's the right decision. That's possible. If the purpose was to invest in a new product, the feeling that you want the client to feel is excited. That is a lot of money and it's a little bit risky but I'm excited because I think there's huge potential in it. Think about the purpose of the project, what you've discovered during that time, and for this final presentation, how is it that you want them to feel? We're going to do key takeaways and I'm going to break them into the different folks. Some of you identify with graduates. You're new to a consulting firm, it might be a big company that you're a part of. A couple of things. One, really pay attention. Pay attention to how the consulting partners manage this process. They manage the client's expectations, they say sometimes no to the client, but in a very smooth way, very savvy, where you said no to the client and yet they're still appreciative that you said no. Like how is that possible? Also, take a look at the executive presence that consulting partners have. What I find something that's really consistent among consulting partners is they're pretty cool. They keep their cool. I mean, things can be falling from the sky and they're still like very grounded, very thoughtful in making decisions. For those of you who are managers, who are internal to a company, a couple of thoughts. One, like we said last time, is, don't sacrifice professionalism, don't cut corners. I'd like for you to be as rigorous and as on-point as external consultants. I want them to really see how well you work and say, my gosh, even though I've worked with you for 13 years here in the company, I had no idea that you're that put together and you do such great work. You are like the external consultants that we had in here a month ago. Also, think about your target bill rate. At the end of the day, your time is super valuable. You could be working on other things. As a result of that, think about who you need to delegate some of this work to and then also be very frank with your manager. If there's a task that honestly isn't as important as this other task, see if there's ways where you can get her agreement that this can take a back burner, or we'll find a way to automate it, or find a way to find an intern or analysts to do it so you can upgrade yourself. The final group or the red airplanes, the sole entrepreneurs, the ones who were consulting, sometimes by themselves. Here, one is the idea that yes, I'm so low, that's true, but we can actually do it better than the big firms. How can you do it better than big firms? You can go faster than them, you might provide more expertise. Like you don't have a leverage model, but that also means you don't have a lot of newbies here at the bottom that you're billing the client for. It's only you, but you're very experienced, and you're very fast, and you're very efficient. Then finally, and I think this is important because you're only one person potentially, because you're a one man shop, it's important for you and I said here, very nice way to say is you empowered the client. But let's just call it what it is. You're asking them to do some of the work too. Being a one man shop, you can't do it all, and so unless you're willing to really build them a lot of money for all the work that you're going to do, you need to do the part of the work that only you can do and have them meet you halfway.
