No More Consultants E-Book

Geoff Parcell

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 233

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

This book provides you with the tools to tap into the capabilities that already exist in your organization, but are as yet inaccessible. The book shows you how to make maximum use and accessibility of existing knowledge by implementing a successful tool, The River Diagram.  This tool will help reveal your organization's strengths and weaknesses, which will aid you in resolving an internal problem. Illustrated using an exciting range of case studies including BP, Oracle, UNAIDS, and others, this book will guide you towards saving both time and money.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1 - Introduction - Why No More Consultants?

Five Key Questions

Chapter by Chapter

Chapter 2 - Discovering the River

Forming the River

Beating Consultants at Their Own Game

Spotting the Potential for Learning and Sharing

Examining the Distribution of Performance

Watching the River Over Time

Chapter 3 - Building the Framework

Deciding Who to Involve

Identifying and Selecting the Practices

Deciding the Variables

Defining the Levels

Focus on Strengths and Use Positive Language

Developing our ‘Effective Meetings’ Example

The Benefits of Global Rather than Local Frameworks

Defining the Strategy

Chapter 4 - Applying the Approach

It’s All About the Conversations

Involving the Procrastinators

The Environment

Sharing Experience Within a Framework

It is Subjective, and De personalises the Emotion

It Challenges Our Assumptions

The Focus for Improvement

Finding Ways to Close the Gap in Performance

Launching and Going to Scale

Chapter 5 - The Role of the Facilitator

What Are the Attributes of a Good Facilitator?

What Does a Facilitator Do?

Chapter 6 - Creating the River

Constructing the River Diagram on Paper

Innovative and Practical Ways to Visualise a River Diagram

Creating the Stairs Diagram

Chapter 7 - Learning from Experience

Offers and Requests

Learning from Experience Through a Peer Assist

Barriers to Sharing

Tall Poppy Syndrome

Shrinking Violet Syndrome

Not Invented Here Syndrome

Real Men Don’t Ask for Directions

Chapter 8 - Improving and Sustaining

Measuring Progress

Leading and Lagging Indicators

Modifying the Framework

Local Customisation

External Benchmarking - Towards Level Six

Chapter 9 - So What Do We Do Now?

Appendix A - Self Assessment Framework for Effective Meetings

Appendix B - Learning and Development Self Assessment Framework

Appendix C - Creating a River Diagram with Excel

Appendix D - Knowledge and Organisation Development in the NHS

Further Reading

Index

Endorsements forNo More Consultants...

“The saying goes that consultants borrow your watch to tell you the time. This book is all about borrowing the consultant’s watch. Practical, and rich with examples, it is about learning from and sharing good practices inside the organisation, and only looking outside for consultancy help where you really need it.”

Graham O’Connell, Head of Organisational Learning and Standards, National School of Government

“Look, of course we need outside input, if not we might as well be staring at our belly-buttons. The point that is being made in No More Consultants is that companies spend pennies in mining their own internal knowledge and expertise compared to the multi-millions spent on going outside first! How does that make any sense or cents?”

Jon Theuerkauf, Managing Director, Credit Suisse

“When facing a challenge, organizations need to know what capabilities they have, but it is not always easy to have honest conversations about who knows what. Here is a book that shows step by step how to help groups articulate what being good at something looks like - and then use this information to self-assess and get better. The authors have both a simple method and the wisdom of experience to make it come alive on complex issues. The result is an invaluable resource.”

Etienne Wenger, author ofCommunities of Practice

“We have applied the innovative techniques described in No More Consultants to enable beneficiaries around the world to develop their capacity. Capacity development draws upon voluntary learning with genuine commitment and interest. The River Diagram and associated methodologies is a way to build on existing capacities, prompt knowledge sharing and optimize expertise.”

Dr Carlos Lopes, UN Assistant-Secretary-General,Executive Director of UNITAR and Director of theUnited Nations System Staff College

“Consultants and smart clients: a rare and insightful view from both sides of the fence. Full of practical recommendations for achieving more value from both internal and external consultants and advisers.”

Professor Edward Truch, Founder of the HenleyKnowledge Management Forum and Visiting Professor,Lancaster University Management School

“The practical methodology - self-assessment framework - introduced by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell with useful techniques and tips will enable many organizations to diagnose their own issues by themselves, and come up with their solutions, instead of relying on prescriptions by outsiders. The step-by-step guidance, and a full of diverse and real-life examples will help teams and organizations to develop their own self-assessment framework, open up the conversation among stakeholders, and improve the way they work.”

Janice Ryu, Knowledge Management Officer,International Finance Corporation, World Bank Group

“About time too! Following on from their excellent work in Learning to Fly, Geoff and Chris have come up with another practical yet powerful approach to help organisations get the most from what they already know. Successfully tried and tested in many different circumstances, their easy to follow advice puts the power to solve problems back into the hands of those who care most about the organisation and the outcome - those who need to live and work with the solution. An essential tool for anyone who has struggled to initiate change, implement a strategy or solve a problem with outside help, but found it slow going.”

Professor Jane McKenzie, Henley Business School

“The best book by far on Knowledge Management is Learning to Fly by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell. This new book is of equal calibre. The authors are not theorists and this book is not only practical but is written in clear, simple language. We have been taught to look to ‘experts’ for help and advice. And although we often do need guidance, we know more than we think. Given the complexity of our twenty-first century organizations it is dangerous to rely on external consultants who can never fully understand the richness of the context in which we work. In this book, Chris and Geoff provide tools and techniques that allow us to tap into our innate capabilities and to do away with rather than automatically relying upon external consultants!”

David Gurteen, Founder and Director, Gurteen Knowledge Community

“By knowing what you know already and utilising the skills within your organisation, this book shows you how to kick the consultancy habit.”

Michael Scott, Chief Executive, Westminster Primary Care Trust

“Simple, straightforward and eminently practical. Chris and Geoff have shown again the power of liberating the knowledge within and around any organisation.”

John Keeble, Sales and Marketing Director, Aon Risk Services

“It’s all about making connections and having the conversations - Geoff and Chris have provided great examples of what businesses can do on a practical, day to day basis to help improve performance and capability. Sharing and learning from each other - simple concepts that don’t have to be wrapped up in complex, abstract processes.”

Sindy Grewal, Head of Knowledge, Audit Commission

“Geoff and Chris have cooked up another winner - No More Consultants, is a brilliant, readable and most importantly, practical guide to unlocking a group’s capacity to understand, improve and do their work. Heck, it isn’t really about consultants at all, but our own power. Regardless if you are a business, a non profit or a community of practice, No More Consultants offers you a framework, tools and guidance. While I loved the whole book, here are some aspects I especially appreciated. It taps into strengths and assets of individuals and groups at every turn, from an appreciative approach to creating ‘the river’, to use of multiple intelligences in the processes put to use. It recognizes the importance of negotiating common language, self assessment (vs external) and the role of conversations to achieve this. I can’t wait to put what I’ve learned to work. Tomorrow! Thanks Chris and Geoff!”

Nancy White, Founder, Full Circle Associates

“A misquote?: If it is dangerous to not know what you should know, then it can be disastrous for you to know something that is not so. Mantra?: Perpetual learning is part of every managers/directors day job. You must never abdicate/delegate the thinking that you should do for yourself . . . or disaster beckons.”

Peter Brickley, Group IT Director, Heineken

“Give an organisation a consultant, and solve today’s problems. Give an organisation tools to identify and use their existing skills and knowledge, to build networks to support knowledge sharing within and across organisations, and to help continuously improve these abilities, and you solve many of tomorrow’s problems, without spending a fortune. This book provides the tools - you just need to use them.”

Helen Nicol, Internal Organisational Development Consultant,Department of Work and Pensions

“Once again Geoff and Chris inspire you to use simple tools and practices that can make a real difference to the knowledge ecology of the organisation and create the opportunity for sustained improvement.”

Michael Norton, Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA)

“There is no shortage of knowledge and experience in local and regional government - the challenge is to find the best way to tap into it and get it flowing. In No More Consultants, Geoff and Chris show us how to overcome this challenge, and access and share the wealth of resources we already have available to us.”

Keith Barnes, former Regional Director,Government Office for the North West

This edition first published 2009

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Collison, Chris.

No more consultants : we know more than we think / Chris Collison, Geoff Parcell.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-74603-5 (hardback)

1. Knowledge management. 2. Organizational learning. I. Parcell, Geoff.

II. Title.

HD30.2.C6284 2009

658.4’038—dc22

2009027973

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Set in 11/14 pt Trebuchet MS by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong

This book is dedicated to all those who have helped us learn, and to all those who will continue to do so in the future.

Foreword

Morpheus: ‘I imagine that right now, you’re feeling a bit like Alice. Hmm? Tumbling down the rabbit hole? … You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland. And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.’ - The Matrix

Geoff Parcell and Chris Collison have designed the perfect red pill … showing you all the secrets of consulting’s wonderland and rabbit holes, with no bad side-effects.

In today’s fast-paced and crazed world, we’re so often forced into the quick fix that consultants can provide, we forget that the only true solutions come from a Zen-like focus on big questions: What problem am I trying to solve? What do I know and not know about how to solve it? Am I willing to live with the questions long enough to allow the answers to reveal themselves?

Like Zen masters, Geoff and Chris begin our journey with questions such as these. No More Consultants is a tool for answering the five core questions that will help you eliminate, reduce and focus your use of consultants, and when you do use them, get the most value for the least effort and lowest cost.

From my life’s work, I would say the most critical of their five questions is Can we identify the issue? I have found that almost all clients are trying to solve the wrong problem. And that’s a consultant’s dream! You’re either guaranteeing them a retainer for life, or that you’ll pay them lots of money to keep solving the wrong problems, until eventually you stumble upon the real one. The good news is that if you follow what Geoff and Chris have laid out, that won’t happen to you!

Major takeaways:

• You can be more purposeful in your use of consultants if you understand the problem well enough to seek help within the organisation before going out to consultants.

• By consistently looking inside first, you unleash the untapped energy and strengths of the organisation.

Years ago, I was brought in by one of the world’s largest banks to simplify and communicate a massive change they were about to roll out within their compensation plan. The change was called broadbanding, where the company would shift from about thirty pay grades to only about seven. Fortunately, I had one of those clients who allowed me to ask the right questions, and discover what the real problem was. And it had nothing to do with compensation!

The hidden challenge that revealed itself was budgeting. See, making this shift meant that someone whose pay grade only allowed a $ 2000 top-to-bottom swing, would now have a $ 10 000+ top-to-bottom swing. The senior execs in charge of budgets were freaked out! They thought that meant that they’d completely lose all control of their human resource costs - which was the largest line item in their budgets.

The problem I was originally brought in to solve was how to get 70 000 people to understand how their pay would remain the same, but their pay grade would change. We discovered that was a secondary problem for later. The more urgent one was to help fifty executives understand how to do budgeting within a broadbanded world. Completely different problem that required a completely approach, solution, scale and urgency.

The result of that one day of asking the right questions: The client didn’t need me any further! No more consultant ! (At least not for another six months, and by then, the scope of the project had been greatly reduced.) What happened by the end of that meeting is what Geoff and Chris call Finding the River: Once we clarified what the real problem was, the client could quickly figure out that most of what he needed to solve the new problem was already sitting within his organisation!

Fast forward through the rest of this awesome book to its close. Geoff and Chris end with ‘… You know more than you think.’ You do! Just like in the Matrix, when Trinity says to Neo, ‘The answer is out there … it’s looking for you, and you will find it if you want to.’

Everything you need to know about no more consultants is within No More Consultants. It helps you tap into your power of self assessment. Let the answer reveal itself to you, and enjoy the journey!

Bill Jensen, Mr Simplicity author of Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage and other books, all about finding what matters within all the noise and clutter.

Preface

In 2001, we wrote our first book together - Learning to Fly. At that time, we were both working for BP, the energy company and wanted to share our experience and learning from a successful knowledge-sharing programme. Three years later, we wrote the second edition: Learning to Fly - Practical Knowledge Management from Leading and Learning Organizations, which incorporated the experience of many other others in the public, private and development sectors, using a number of tools and techniques to help knowledge flow around and between organisations. Since that time, we have been practising what we know - and, as independent consultants and advisors, working in many more different contexts, learning a lot more.

I guess we have all smiled wryly at the author Robert Townsend’s well-known quote: ‘Consultants ask to borrow your watch to tell you the time, and then walk off with your watch!’ Whilst we smile though, we know that there is an element of truth in the quote.

During our roles in multinational organisations, we have been on the receiving end of recommendations offered by external management consultants. We have both had roles in those same organisations as internal consultants; and over the past four years, we have also experienced being hired as external consultants. From these various viewpoints we have observed that consultants are not always hired for the right reasons and are frequently not deployed to optimum effect.

No More Consultants is a book which raises the question of how we can be more purposeful in our use of management consultants. It is a book for managers who commission consultants to help deliver their business results. It is also a book for the people within organisations who feel that they have the knowledge and capability themselves to solve some of the issues that highly paid consultants are brought in to address - leaving their recommendations for others to implement. No More Consultants is the book you’d buy for someone who is committed to continuous improvement, and is frustrated that their organisation unthinkingly relies too much on external help.

We believe organisations can do more to learn what, and where, their strengths are in order to first benefit from their own good practices. We have used the self-assessment approach described in the book in many settings and for a number of topics. From our experience, we know that this approach is transferable. We will explain in detail how to determine and make best possible use of what your organisation already knows. This in turn will help you to establish whether and when to bring in consultants so that you get the best from what they have to offer you.

There are many people to acknowledge who helped in the writing of this book but in particular, we want to thank:

Sophie Smiles Director of i&i

Graham O’Connell, Head of Organisational Development at the National School of Government

Karen Eden, Director, EMEA Partnering Excellence Programme Office, Oracle

Deborah Pilkington at the Government Office of the NW

Lynne Keech, Knowledge Consultant at Nationwide

The coaches at the Constellation for AIDS Competence

Rachel Cooke, research fellow at the NHS Institute for Improvement and Innovation

Professor Vicharn Panich of the Knowledge Management Institute in Thailand

Professor Martin Elliott at Great Ormond Street Hospital, (and Ferrari)

Charlotte Diez at UNITAR

Phil Forth and Barry Smale for painstakingly reading and editing the proofs.

And of course, our wives and families for their enduring support and encouragement - again!

Geoff Parcell & Chris Collison August 2009

1

Introduction - Why No More Consultants?

From time to time, most organisations bring in teams of consultants; perhaps to help develop strategies, advise on policies or solve thorny problems. Your organisation might be planning to move to the next level of performance, and need some inspiration from outside. It could be that you believe that you need professional assistance in introducing change: a new enterprise software platform, a new strategy, evaluating new business opportunities, outsourcing or off-shoring. Consultants are also brought into organisations to help deal with something unexpected; a financial downturn, an opportunistic acquisition or disposal, or the succession of a senior executive.

Why is it that so often the instinctive response to such changes, planned or unplanned, is to employ consulting resources from outside the organisation?

Sometimes we need a neutral agent to disentangle the emotion and politics from hard-nosed business decisions.

Sometimes, the personal stakes are high, and we feel we really don’t want to get this wrong.

Sometimes our own internal staff are too busy doing the day-to-day work, so we need to buy in temporary extra capacity.

Sometimes it seems the external consultant’s voice carries more weight with senior management, or is considered to be impartial.

Sometimes they are expected to make unpalatable recommendations and it will be cathartic to be able to blame them for the decision (and also if things go wrong!).

Sometimes, however, we just press the consultancy button without really thinking it through. That’s not smart.

So the consultants arrive, interview the stakeholders, diagnose the problem and formulate some recommendations. Their recommendations are often afforded a level of respect by the management team, a level which would never be offered to suggestions which came directly from the employees. As a consequence, members of staff are left with a frustration that the consultants drew all of the ideas, solutions and expertise from within the organisation, yet they took all the credit for the recommendations themselves.

Having delivered their finely crafted PowerPoint presentation, the consultancy team exits the stage, leaving behind a set of strategies or solutions to be implemented.

Unfortunately, the staff who are tasked with implementation don’t feel that they ‘own’ the solutions, and the results often fall far short of the PowerPoint dreams from the boardroom.

‘Perhaps we need to bring in some trouble-shooters to help us understand why the implementation failed? Now where’s that business card that someone gave me …?’

Stop! Please stop!

Since we left major organisations and became independent consultants we have learned a lot by working with a variety of different groups and organisations. In particular, we have learned that a self-assessment approach is a highly effective way of having the right conversations. The right conversations are the ones which lead you to discover the knowledge and experience which is most important to the organisation, and the actions it needs to take in order to be successful.

Five Key Questions

We believe that there are five key questions for an organisation to pose:

• Can we identify the issue?

• Do we know our internal capability?

• Does anyone do this well internally?

• Do we know who is good at it externally?

• Having identified who does it well, are they available to help us, either by sharing what they know or by implementing it?

Let’s explore each of these questions in more detail.

Can We Identify the Issue?

One of the biggest challenges facing an organisation that is striving to improve its performance is to identify the right issue to tackle. Much valuable time and resource can be wasted by people solving the wrong issue. In our experience, the person posing the question ‘What’s the real issue here?’ will get a different response depending on whether the respondent has the title of IT consultant, Business Manager, HR professional or Senior Engineer. If you have a tool in your hand when you pose the question, this will inevitably frame the way you define the issue too. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail! But if the real issue was hanging a picture to maximise its impact, then perhaps you should have been considering if the picture was right for the style and colour scheme of the room long before you reached for the wall-fixings.

There have been many instances where lack of diagnosis of the issue has led to a lot of wasted effort in resolving the wrong issue. Time spent analysing the underlying issue is well spent to ensure that the solutions considered address the right issue. Sometimes this can be more obvious to a pair of ‘outside eyes’, that is, people not too close to the issue and who have the benefit of other contexts. Are you recognising the symptoms and dealing with those or diagnosing the root cause? After all, it is more effective to do the right thing than do things right.

Do We Know Our Internal Capability?

Donald Rumsfeld the US Defense Secretary is quoted as saying:

I don’t know what the facts are but somebody’s certainly going to sit down with him and find out what he knows that they may not know, and make sure he knows what they know that he may not know.

Now I don’t know if I know what I think he wanted to say … but many organisations simply do not know what they know.

As individuals, we are usually known for the work we are currently doing, and even if our résumé is up to date and available for others to read, it probably does not describe what we know, merely what our past positions were or what we have done.

Once you have the issue clear, ask yourself ‘do you know if anyone is already doing this in-house?’. The emphasis here is on the knowing because frequently we do not know what the organisation knows. If someone does know and has experience of doing it, we can then check if they do it well and if they are available to help us. If we do not know whether or not we have good practice in-house - and in our experience this is most often the case - then finding out if the knowledge exists in other departments or project groups is a good first step. If you do have a way of finding out that the knowledge exists then getting together to share that knowledge may be all that is required to tackle the issue yourselves. In previous books, we have written about bespoke ‘yellow pages systems’ to share who we are, what we know and what we are prepared to share. In today’s Web 2.0 world we can use any number of social networking sites to achieve the same end. It’s often easier to discover the abilities and experience of your work colleagues through LinkedIn, Facebook or Xing, than it is to use the formal corporate systems.

Does Anyone Do this Well Internally?

Find out who does it well, where the strengths lie in the organisation. Too often we look only at the current competencies being used and are ignorant of what additional strengths people have that are also available to the organisation. It is possible that all the knowledge and resources you need may be there, but since this is not a business-as-usual activity, it can be worth having a coach help the team get to ‘match fitness’.

For example, in any change programme it is common to assemble a task force from those in the organisation who are likely to have to live through the change and to make it happen. One reason for doing this is to ensure ownership of the solution; there is nothing worse than feeling that you are having change imposed upon you. This task force team might comprise a wide range of people, levels and roles. A temporary project team such as this, which includes accountants, engineers or nurses, may or may not feel confident to facilitate brainstorming sessions or draw process flow diagrams. Their diversity is positive when it comes to understanding the issue but it may need harnessing.

Do We Know Who is Good at it Externally?