In all relationships, not just personal ones, it is essential to know one's own boundaries. You really can't know the boundaries of other people until you cross them and by then... it's too late. In a business relationship it is better by far to write your boundaries down in the contract; make it all known so that both you and the client know what you will and will not do.
Easy. Not so much for the consultant who becomes Project Manager (PM) for the client, using the client's staff for implementation. Larry Richman, in his standard 'Improving Your Project Management Skills' suggest that project objectives must past the Specific, Measurable, Agreed upon, Realistic, Time/Cost limited (SMART) test. Many are the clients who come to us and say, "We want a document management system." when they have never specifically identified what the objectives of such a system are for their organization. It may sound ideal, they want you to tell them what their objectives are; you get to decide how deep and wide the project will go, how long it will last, and what will be needed, but you open yourself up to the accusation that your decisions are self-serving (and enriching). It will happen, at some point, with every client; they will doubt the need for some aspect of a project and someone on staff will suggest that the consultants are bloating the budget to bloat their fees.
Once the client has given you their objective for the project you can define the rest of the SMART test in your contract. The key difference here is that on most projects the PM herself is the one defining the objectives of the project. This is fine for a staff PM; internal audiences will not suspect her of anything, she has nothing to gain from a more expensive or longer project. If you are working as the PM maker sure the sponsoring executive (SE) of the project has defined the project objectivess and, then, have her tell you what she defines as success. Make sure the SE explains, company wide if need be, the objectives of the project and the metrics of success so that staff knows it is the SE, and not you, defining the scope of the project.
Ideally, a consulting PM will simply serve as a liaison between existing teams, coordinating their efforts and measuring their progress. It is more likely that you will have to do more than coordinate existing teams, the client could have done that themselves. Your worth most likely lies in your specific knowledge of the project at hand. Staying with the document management project example, you know what the legal requirements are, you know what the user experience must be like to encourage adoption, you know which products work together etc. Your specialization argues for giving you the authority on questions related to your bailiwick, even when that authority crosses pre-existing reporting relationships or temporarily subordinates them. The SE has to make sure that every member of staff knows that she has given you the authority to make such decisions. Reinforce the point with frequent project meetings where the SE defers to your judgment and where you run the meeting.
An even cleaner way to define the relationship with the client staff is to ask the SE to second specific employees to your management for the duration of their role in the project. This will make the project go faster as a seconded employees should have no other responsibilities than working on the project. If you have to compete for the attention of employees with managers they have to work with long after you are gone, you will not be given priority treatment no matter what directive the SE has given.
Next time: Strategies to manage client employees.
08 July 2008
30 April 2008
The Perils of Consulting: Project Management
Today we start a series of posts on the perils of project management as consultants and how clients and consultants can avoid some of the potholes on the road to project implementation.
CONSULTING vs CONTRACTING
Let us use an analogy from another industry: Architects and Builders. Although many architectural practices are moving toward integrated management, most still operate essentially as consultants to their clients who then take the ideas the architect has sold them to builders who work directly for the client. The builders are the contractors, they will actually perform the work to complete the project. The architects stay on hand, of course, to offer solutions to technological problems or to clarify their design ideas.
Now take any project a business needs to complete, they can use their own staff to design and execute the project, or they can hire consultants to research and design the project (especially when the project is outside the expertise of the firm itself) while their staff performs the actual work, or they can hire the consultant to implement the plan. We find that this is the first place a consultant and a client can have a clash of expectations. As a consultant one's role is fairly clear: Advise the client. However, once you cross over into the active daily management of the project or performance of the component work one has become a contractor. In the building trades this is usually not a problem as contractors use their own or sub-contracted employees, they typically do not oversee or direct the client's employees though frequent collaboration may be necessary for logistical reasons. If a consultancy is hired to manage a project for an internal business project where in the line of authority does the consultant/manager lie?
Managing a client's employees for them is bound to lead to resentment, confusion and conflict. Such employees will be confused, even with the best guidelines, about the priorities of their job and the authority of the consultant. They may well resent the imposition of a new manager they have never worked for and who will be gone post-implementation. Still, having management authority over the client's employees is better than not having it, while still being the manager of the project. If the consultant is tasked with project management without the authority to direct individuals or even departments the consultant will have a difficult time getting their work done over the other priorities and relationships that shape work flow in the client firm. This can (and for us has) led to some nasty confrontations with entire departments that were angry (not at us per se) that an outsider was attempting to direct their work.
It is obviously much better to clearly establish what it is one wants, both as a client and as a consultant. Does the consultant want to reap the financial benefits of project implementation or do the design work and hand it off? Does the client want a start to finish consultant cum contractor to work alongside its employees or in a self contained unit?
Next time we will talk about defining the role of the consultant and if work that requires internal authority is required, how to segment the scope of the work to minimize clashes with existing client employee priorities and expectations.
CONSULTING vs CONTRACTING
Let us use an analogy from another industry: Architects and Builders. Although many architectural practices are moving toward integrated management, most still operate essentially as consultants to their clients who then take the ideas the architect has sold them to builders who work directly for the client. The builders are the contractors, they will actually perform the work to complete the project. The architects stay on hand, of course, to offer solutions to technological problems or to clarify their design ideas.
Now take any project a business needs to complete, they can use their own staff to design and execute the project, or they can hire consultants to research and design the project (especially when the project is outside the expertise of the firm itself) while their staff performs the actual work, or they can hire the consultant to implement the plan. We find that this is the first place a consultant and a client can have a clash of expectations. As a consultant one's role is fairly clear: Advise the client. However, once you cross over into the active daily management of the project or performance of the component work one has become a contractor. In the building trades this is usually not a problem as contractors use their own or sub-contracted employees, they typically do not oversee or direct the client's employees though frequent collaboration may be necessary for logistical reasons. If a consultancy is hired to manage a project for an internal business project where in the line of authority does the consultant/manager lie?
Managing a client's employees for them is bound to lead to resentment, confusion and conflict. Such employees will be confused, even with the best guidelines, about the priorities of their job and the authority of the consultant. They may well resent the imposition of a new manager they have never worked for and who will be gone post-implementation. Still, having management authority over the client's employees is better than not having it, while still being the manager of the project. If the consultant is tasked with project management without the authority to direct individuals or even departments the consultant will have a difficult time getting their work done over the other priorities and relationships that shape work flow in the client firm. This can (and for us has) led to some nasty confrontations with entire departments that were angry (not at us per se) that an outsider was attempting to direct their work.
It is obviously much better to clearly establish what it is one wants, both as a client and as a consultant. Does the consultant want to reap the financial benefits of project implementation or do the design work and hand it off? Does the client want a start to finish consultant cum contractor to work alongside its employees or in a self contained unit?
Next time we will talk about defining the role of the consultant and if work that requires internal authority is required, how to segment the scope of the work to minimize clashes with existing client employee priorities and expectations.
20 March 2008
Did you see it coming? We certainly did but we kept our collective mouths shut about it. But now the cat is out of the bag: the second great internet implosion has begun. Most people have been focused on the burst of the housing bubble and have heard only great things about how facebook and myspace are revolutionizing the internet and how Yahoo! is failing because it missed the social space phenomenon.
We give this a collective ha!. The seeds of the second bubble, what some are calling Bubble 2.0 were scattered into the wind even as the first burst was still a painful ache in our bank accounts. The issue then as now is how to monetize a commodity which is in essence free or so cheap that it might as well be free. For all the talk of a revolutionary of transformative technology, the internet was and remains a giant magazine where the actual cost of the product could never be carried by the cover price or the subscription price and thus the only way to stay afloat in so called "old media" or the new fangeled is to get advertisers to pay for eyeballs. Yes, yes I know people buy things on the internet, but look at the roller-coaster valuation of Amazon over the last ten years, or consider the rapidly rising displeasure with eBay. Both of these sellers extract a fee for something a direct retailer will do for free: sell you stuff.
After the last internet collapse the .com veterans and their venture capital enablers proclaimed that next time they would have a profitable business plan in place before their IPO. Yet we see chimeras like facebook and myspace outrageously over valued and depending entirely on their ability to provide eyeballs to direct advertising or to convince business that buzz marketing is the future and social space networks are the medium for the marketing. Which does nothing to counter the argument against buying ads or even marketing on the internet. First, initial results of campaigns are TOO accurate in measuring the effectiveness of the campaign. Broken down into clicks vs views vs purchases the actual cost of a campaign is not a pretty thing to see. Residual value is of course very hard to measure and is just as fuzzy as the numbers revealed by old-media ads. As for buzz marketing, how will buzz-to-purchase be measured? There is no more irony in the world, the New Yorker last week ran a short story about a New York trendsetter who resents be co-opted into buzz marketing.
The internet that we look forward to is the one that will reduce the cost of doing business and provide constant technological improvement included in a monthly cost of service. Google has started the process with its cloud computing. Users of Google Doc and Spreadsheet will find many, many problems with the system but it does what Microsoft does not: it gets better everyday with out you having to buy a new round of software. Someday Google will be able to monetize these online services as secure business appliances and eventually our hard drives will be free of those hundreds of thousands of jpegs and .docs as we leave everything on the distributed safety net of Google's redundant server arrays.
We don't exactly have Schadenfruede over this coming/here collapse, but anything that drives down real estate prices in San Francisco and Portland is not all bad.
We give this a collective ha!. The seeds of the second bubble, what some are calling Bubble 2.0 were scattered into the wind even as the first burst was still a painful ache in our bank accounts. The issue then as now is how to monetize a commodity which is in essence free or so cheap that it might as well be free. For all the talk of a revolutionary of transformative technology, the internet was and remains a giant magazine where the actual cost of the product could never be carried by the cover price or the subscription price and thus the only way to stay afloat in so called "old media" or the new fangeled is to get advertisers to pay for eyeballs. Yes, yes I know people buy things on the internet, but look at the roller-coaster valuation of Amazon over the last ten years, or consider the rapidly rising displeasure with eBay. Both of these sellers extract a fee for something a direct retailer will do for free: sell you stuff.
After the last internet collapse the .com veterans and their venture capital enablers proclaimed that next time they would have a profitable business plan in place before their IPO. Yet we see chimeras like facebook and myspace outrageously over valued and depending entirely on their ability to provide eyeballs to direct advertising or to convince business that buzz marketing is the future and social space networks are the medium for the marketing. Which does nothing to counter the argument against buying ads or even marketing on the internet. First, initial results of campaigns are TOO accurate in measuring the effectiveness of the campaign. Broken down into clicks vs views vs purchases the actual cost of a campaign is not a pretty thing to see. Residual value is of course very hard to measure and is just as fuzzy as the numbers revealed by old-media ads. As for buzz marketing, how will buzz-to-purchase be measured? There is no more irony in the world, the New Yorker last week ran a short story about a New York trendsetter who resents be co-opted into buzz marketing.
The internet that we look forward to is the one that will reduce the cost of doing business and provide constant technological improvement included in a monthly cost of service. Google has started the process with its cloud computing. Users of Google Doc and Spreadsheet will find many, many problems with the system but it does what Microsoft does not: it gets better everyday with out you having to buy a new round of software. Someday Google will be able to monetize these online services as secure business appliances and eventually our hard drives will be free of those hundreds of thousands of jpegs and .docs as we leave everything on the distributed safety net of Google's redundant server arrays.
We don't exactly have Schadenfruede over this coming/here collapse, but anything that drives down real estate prices in San Francisco and Portland is not all bad.
04 March 2008
More Non-Stop Antioch
Turning again to the remarkable events at little old Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Indeed, Antioch is becoming the little-college-that-could, or more correctly the Antioch alumni are becoming the alumni-who-will-not-go-away. Over the last weekend the Antioch College Alumni Association pledged itself to a concept called "Non-Stop Antioch". Under this audacious plan, the faculty and alumni will work to continue to offering an Antioch education if the University declares the college closed. If the University, which is in negotiations with the Antioch College Continuance Corporation (AC3) (an Ohio not-for-profit created to take over the College as a separate legal from the University and preserve the College's historic assets) which might lead to an emancipated Antioch College for the first time since 1977.
This weekend's events were spurred by a Board of Trustees meeting held at the Antioch University Campus in Santa Barbara (oh how redcellconsultants wishes for a job in Santa Barbara) during which the University unilaterally announced that it was closing the college. This was quite a shock to members of the aforementioned AC3 who were in town to carry on with negotiations. The rest of the story is of interest only to those directly connected to the school but the modus operandi of the University offers some lessons for what to do and what NOT to doin a crisis, or a negotiation. We shall let the reader decide which is which:
1) If you want the negotiations to fail to do not set conditions that can be met by the other side. Indeed the Trustees first declared closing in the face of a financial collapse at the college. The alumni association raised over $100,000 per day and offered the money up to keep the college open. The University later claimed that it wanted at least $18 MM as a sort of earnest bond from the alumni to keep the college open. The alumni raised the money and still the Trustees say no.
2) If you want to make sure your alumni will leave you out of their estate planning, do appropriate gifts given with specific covenants to other unapproved projects or uses. Indeed the Trustees have admitted that various bequests to the college have been used for work other than what they were intended for. Who would ever give again.
3) If you want to avoid an Attorney's General investigation don't fraudulently solicit donations by failing to mention to your mark... er donor that you have already committed yourself to closing down the institution at the center of the donor's bequest.
4) If you want to salvage what remains of your reputation, give in and take credit for the resulting success or say I told you so if the endeavor collapses. Antioch University has consistently claimed that all of its other unites are thriving except for the allowed deficits given to the College. If this is the case, why not let the College go its own way, relieving you of the burden, and fulfilling your fiduciary duty by exorcising that part of the University which you maintain threatens the whole. The liability of such a hand-off would fall squarely on the shoulders of the emancipated organization. Unless of course you are hiding plans for even more tremendous pecuniary gain by selling off the assets of your flagship and namesake institution.
Indeed it seems that Simpson Scarborough, the University's PR firm either has a client that does not listen to their advice or the firm specializes in counter-message advising i.e., they really want the College to stay open so they advise the University to maximize the anger therefore the mobilization of the alumni. From the begging SS has advised a corporatist model of operation for all of its higher education clients. Looking over their client list, one could be excused for wondering what exactly the firm has done for their clients. SS's supposed expertise in Branding and Marketing is certainly nowhere to be seen in connection with Antioch University, how can it help the brand or attract customers to have your largest alumni base take legal action against you, have a Chancellor that has the distinction of receiving a vote of no confidence by two separate units of the University.
Our advice, at least for Antioch University, is free. If you want to succeed at what you do (educate through non-residential and degree completion programs, ala Walden U.), let the College go quietly with all of its assets intact. Change your name so that that if the College fails you will not be associated with the failure in every search engine report for "Antioch", and take on a new name that reflects who you are and what you do. Though we normally charge a nice fat fee for branding we will provide a few free suggestions: The American School of Adult Learning, has a very imposing name, no local or religious associations and the acronym is ASAL, easy to remember!; Profit Education Centers, a true reflection of the business model you seem to have adopted and each unit can generate its own specific name so that students have the illusion that they are attending a school where the control is local not several thousand miles away in a town in Ohio no one has ever heard of; The Flat Earth School of Leadership and Change Management, you can get Tom Friedman to serve on your board. The opportunities are there, seize them.
On the other hand, stiff arm the alumni, walk away from their $18 MM, lose the goodwill of 17,000 living alums (who turn out to be wealthier than anyone thought), close down an institution with a 155 year history of exhorting its graduates to "Be ashamed to die until you have won some small victory for humanity." But for heaven's sack, impose a media black out, stop letting your administrators attack the alumni and the faculty of the school. In a hostile take over you smother the opposition as quickly as you can, BEFORE a movement organizes to really oppose your actions.
Again all of this is gratis and admittedly biased and personal. So we can rest easy Antioch University will not listen to our advice. But really, could things be any worse than they are now?
This weekend's events were spurred by a Board of Trustees meeting held at the Antioch University Campus in Santa Barbara (oh how redcellconsultants wishes for a job in Santa Barbara) during which the University unilaterally announced that it was closing the college. This was quite a shock to members of the aforementioned AC3 who were in town to carry on with negotiations. The rest of the story is of interest only to those directly connected to the school but the modus operandi of the University offers some lessons for what to do and what NOT to doin a crisis, or a negotiation. We shall let the reader decide which is which:
1) If you want the negotiations to fail to do not set conditions that can be met by the other side. Indeed the Trustees first declared closing in the face of a financial collapse at the college. The alumni association raised over $100,000 per day and offered the money up to keep the college open. The University later claimed that it wanted at least $18 MM as a sort of earnest bond from the alumni to keep the college open. The alumni raised the money and still the Trustees say no.
2) If you want to make sure your alumni will leave you out of their estate planning, do appropriate gifts given with specific covenants to other unapproved projects or uses. Indeed the Trustees have admitted that various bequests to the college have been used for work other than what they were intended for. Who would ever give again.
3) If you want to avoid an Attorney's General investigation don't fraudulently solicit donations by failing to mention to your mark... er donor that you have already committed yourself to closing down the institution at the center of the donor's bequest.
4) If you want to salvage what remains of your reputation, give in and take credit for the resulting success or say I told you so if the endeavor collapses. Antioch University has consistently claimed that all of its other unites are thriving except for the allowed deficits given to the College. If this is the case, why not let the College go its own way, relieving you of the burden, and fulfilling your fiduciary duty by exorcising that part of the University which you maintain threatens the whole. The liability of such a hand-off would fall squarely on the shoulders of the emancipated organization. Unless of course you are hiding plans for even more tremendous pecuniary gain by selling off the assets of your flagship and namesake institution.
Indeed it seems that Simpson Scarborough, the University's PR firm either has a client that does not listen to their advice or the firm specializes in counter-message advising i.e., they really want the College to stay open so they advise the University to maximize the anger therefore the mobilization of the alumni. From the begging SS has advised a corporatist model of operation for all of its higher education clients. Looking over their client list, one could be excused for wondering what exactly the firm has done for their clients. SS's supposed expertise in Branding and Marketing is certainly nowhere to be seen in connection with Antioch University, how can it help the brand or attract customers to have your largest alumni base take legal action against you, have a Chancellor that has the distinction of receiving a vote of no confidence by two separate units of the University.
Our advice, at least for Antioch University, is free. If you want to succeed at what you do (educate through non-residential and degree completion programs, ala Walden U.), let the College go quietly with all of its assets intact. Change your name so that that if the College fails you will not be associated with the failure in every search engine report for "Antioch", and take on a new name that reflects who you are and what you do. Though we normally charge a nice fat fee for branding we will provide a few free suggestions: The American School of Adult Learning, has a very imposing name, no local or religious associations and the acronym is ASAL, easy to remember!; Profit Education Centers, a true reflection of the business model you seem to have adopted and each unit can generate its own specific name so that students have the illusion that they are attending a school where the control is local not several thousand miles away in a town in Ohio no one has ever heard of; The Flat Earth School of Leadership and Change Management, you can get Tom Friedman to serve on your board. The opportunities are there, seize them.
On the other hand, stiff arm the alumni, walk away from their $18 MM, lose the goodwill of 17,000 living alums (who turn out to be wealthier than anyone thought), close down an institution with a 155 year history of exhorting its graduates to "Be ashamed to die until you have won some small victory for humanity." But for heaven's sack, impose a media black out, stop letting your administrators attack the alumni and the faculty of the school. In a hostile take over you smother the opposition as quickly as you can, BEFORE a movement organizes to really oppose your actions.
Again all of this is gratis and admittedly biased and personal. So we can rest easy Antioch University will not listen to our advice. But really, could things be any worse than they are now?
01 February 2008
Another example of sacrafice over opportunity, can Antioch College ever acheive peace with economic opportunity?
RedCell maintains a close connection to Antioch College located in Yellow Springs, Ohio. At least one of our consultants is an active alum and has been particularly active during Antioch's recent travails. The text that follows is a proposed vision statement for the reorganization of the college as a entity distinct from Antioch University, and of the college's defining mission. Unfortunately, this vision statement does not position Antioch as a school that is ready to prepare its students for the opportunities their futures might hold, rather it lands squarely in the old environmental paradigm of sacrifice. Could it be any clearer that the silent majority do not want to hear about how the perceived crisis of global warming will demand sacrifices on their part. The message that the silent majority of Americans are open to hearing is about economic opportunity. The green technology revolution offers both the opportunity for economic empowerment through development and remedies to some of the most unpleasant aspects of an industrialized and highly technical society.
The key words and phrases here are "rebalance" which suggests a return to some idealized past when humans lived in harmony with their environment, "social and ecological balance" implies that there is some objective balance to be struck that does not depend on a particular point of view based on cultural accumulations and artifacts, finally "healthy lasting world" according to whom, and by what objective definition.
As others have pointed out the line of thought behind the use of these words is inherently alienating to the majority of the public and in terms of people paying for their children's college education, it is unlikely that a poke in the eye will encourage the average two car household to cart junior off to an expensive private education where junior is taught to repudiate the way of life that led to their privileged position in the world. What gets a parent's heart is a vision that their children will find gainful employment after they graduate. By all means sell the green revolution to attract students, but sell it for its economic potential not for the opportunities it offers for personal and environmental altruism.
"Stimulating interest in the building of a philosophy and a pattern for living is the highest function of higher education and perhaps the one most neglected."
- Arthur Morgan
At this extraordinary time in the history of our planet we are challenged to rebalance our pattern of living on Earth. The regeneration of Antioch College presents a unique opportunity to address this challenge. The transition to living in social and ecological balance will require leadership, vision and invention on an unprecedented scale. Through Antioch's tradition of experiential learning, social activism and participatory community, our students will bring together classroom, community, and co-op, integrating theory with practice, and global perspective with local implementation. We envision Antioch College as a demonstration of sustainable patterns of living where students, in community, explore and experience environmental, economic, artisitc, and social practices integral to a healthy lasting world.
The key words and phrases here are "rebalance" which suggests a return to some idealized past when humans lived in harmony with their environment, "social and ecological balance" implies that there is some objective balance to be struck that does not depend on a particular point of view based on cultural accumulations and artifacts, finally "healthy lasting world" according to whom, and by what objective definition.
As others have pointed out the line of thought behind the use of these words is inherently alienating to the majority of the public and in terms of people paying for their children's college education, it is unlikely that a poke in the eye will encourage the average two car household to cart junior off to an expensive private education where junior is taught to repudiate the way of life that led to their privileged position in the world. What gets a parent's heart is a vision that their children will find gainful employment after they graduate. By all means sell the green revolution to attract students, but sell it for its economic potential not for the opportunities it offers for personal and environmental altruism.
"Stimulating interest in the building of a philosophy and a pattern for living is the highest function of higher education and perhaps the one most neglected."
- Arthur Morgan
At this extraordinary time in the history of our planet we are challenged to rebalance our pattern of living on Earth. The regeneration of Antioch College presents a unique opportunity to address this challenge. The transition to living in social and ecological balance will require leadership, vision and invention on an unprecedented scale. Through Antioch's tradition of experiential learning, social activism and participatory community, our students will bring together classroom, community, and co-op, integrating theory with practice, and global perspective with local implementation. We envision Antioch College as a demonstration of sustainable patterns of living where students, in community, explore and experience environmental, economic, artisitc, and social practices integral to a healthy lasting world.
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