A simple fact: you need someone to manage consultants to get your money’s worth out of them. We have seen, and been in, situations where no one was in charge of consultants. These projects were chaotic from both the perspective of the consultant and the client – and clients didn’t get much value out of their hired consultants. Some consultants will even take advantage of this situation. They unilaterally expand the scope of their work and run up excessive bills. In most cases unmanaged consultants leave clients with a bad feeling about consultants and consultants with a bad reputation.
It significantly benefits both client and consultant if a single individual, from the client, is responsible for overseeing the consultant. Typically this “client manager”:
- Gets regular status updates from the consultant;
- Coordinates the consultant activities within the client organization;
- Ensure any products the consultant delivers meets agreed upon timeframes, standards, and need;
- Communicates relevant information to the consultant and within the client organization;
- Handles any issues and problems that occur during the consulting engagement;
- Reviews and approves consultant invoices and manages financial issues;
- Handles contractual issues (or takes issues to the contract manager); and
- Fires the consultant if they are not performing.
Who this individual is depends on the nature of the engagement. Sensitive organizational assessments or reorganization projects might report to the head of HR or the agency director. On our QA projects we typically report to the project sponsor. For coding projects it makes sense to have your consultants report to the development or project manager. One way to think about this is to think about who will pay the price if the consultant (or project) fails – that is the person that should be in charge of the consultant.
Some common mistakes we see in setting up a client manager include:
- The client manager is him/herself a consultant rather than an agency employee;
- Consultants report to a “committee” of some kind (we’ve found this has the same result as having no one in charge); and
- The client manager is a low level staff person with little or nothing riding on the engagement outcome.
So the question for you is who is in charge of the consultants around your organization?
This is part of a series of articles designed to help clients and their consultants have more effective and efficient engagements.