JK's Diary

C-D-EC model: Consulting – Delivery – Extended Consulting/Collaboration Model

Abstract

Are you faced with questions like,
• ‘Consulting – Is it an Expense or an Investment?’
• ‘Strategy – Is it just a jargon or a savior?’
• ‘Roadmap – Is it on track as planned? How do I do a health check?’

Corporates over a period of time had invested a lot of money in various tools and technologies to cater to the needs of various departments within their organization. This has now grown into a mammoth and has started to eat into their profits through licensing costs, maintenance costs, etc. Sometimes one has lost count of the number of application in the landscape, has no clue what a particular application is for, who is using it and why it was needed in the first place? The impact of this has become even more evident especially during the recession period as the IT budgets became slim and expectations from the top management to cut costs increased. The CIO now needs to strategize the IT spends to manage the cost within the budget. This paper tries to address where the CIO can start and how to leverage the services provided by various IT service providers.

Read on to find out how the recession hit industries can leverage the consulting arm of the IT service providers to cut costs and at the same time get a futuristic view of their architecture / approach.

Recession hit Industry:
During recession, quite a few Corporates had employed IT consultants to increase their productivity and cut costs. They achieved this by trying to get a neutral 3rd party view of where they were and what they needed to do next, to sustain themselves during recession. These corporates were primarily looking at consolidation, rationalization and/or optimization of their existing setup and even re-org in some cases.

Situation in the IT Services industry:
IT service providers realized the need for value added services in the market and forayed into the consulting services spectrum during the recession period. This was not set up just to help the clients come out of recession but also to sustain themselves as the IT budgets were growing thin.

In how many cases has one seen the consulting team go back and check what went right or wrong in their proposed recommendation? Even if everything went right, what is the probability that the users have bought into the solution? The problem is really fixed and users are reaping the benefits?

The real problem here is that the consulting and delivery are two separate arms inside the same organization. There are pros & cons to this setup, and yes, they are different beasts. They need to have separate teams, heads, etc. but to achieve the full potential and for the survival of both these arms in the long run, they have to work hand-in-hand. Gone are the days when CIOs just wanted help in ‘doing it’, now they want to have ‘insights’ into what their competitors are doing. This has lead to a very strong and rapid growth in the consulting arm within the IT services organization.

Let’s ask the question, “Can Consulting survive another recession, if it were to happen in the near term?” The answer would be, consulting might not survive as well as it did in the last recession as most of the companies would now have already or just about gone through a fairly large consolidation, rationalization and/or optimization exercise. So in order to survive the next recession, consulting will now have to start looking at new avenues through which it can find in-roads into their clients and keep the consulting arm from taking a hit.

The Solution:
Typically there is a strategy phase and then there is an implementation phase. The missing piece here is a continual monitoring/improvement phase. While consulting arm takes care of the strategic piece and delivery arm takes care of the implementation, the “Extended consulting” will take care of this continual monitoring/improvement phase and also client relationship.

To sustain the consulting industry in the long run, a strong link between the consulting and delivery arm needs to be created now. The result of this link would be a C-D-EC (Consulting – Delivery – Extended consulting/collaboration) model. The advantage here is twofold. One, it helps the consultants provide better recommendations and customize their existing frameworks. Two, after everything is setup, a minor tweak to the original recommendation based on user feedback can go a long way in terms of user buy-in, higher satisfaction levels, etc. One cannot deny the fact that there is a link between the two arms as of today but one has to understand that this link is weak and not sufficient for survival in the long run.

For pure-play consulting firms, where the implementation is done by another vendor, or cases where the delivery team (implementation team) belongs to a different vendor because the clients’ organization has a policy of not deploying the same vendor for consulting and implementation will have to customize their model to have an in-road back into the organization to Re-assess and Optimize. Now one might ask, “Is it good to have the same vendor for both consulting and delivery?” This is a debatable topic weighing the pros and cons, but the C-D-EC model is fairly isolated from this problem. Who does it, does not matter. Is it done, is what that matters here.

If consulting and delivery is done by the same vendor, the initial homework can be done by providing the consulting arm, access to the delivery team’s repository in-house. This will give the consultants sufficient time to study what was carried out at the clients site based on their recommendations, come up with tweaks and value adds before they go back to the client to make amendments to their earlier proposed recommendations and make it stronger and better. A by-product of this effort is that the consultants now have an opportunity to build better frameworks and processes around their existing frameworks. This can then be put forward to clients who are yet to undergo an optimization or consolidation exercise.

C-D-EC (Consulting – Delivery – Extended Consulting/Collaboration) model
The consulting models followed by various organizations across the globe when mapped to a six-sigma methodology would indicate that it only address a portion of the methodology. When the delivery team takes over and completes the implementation, we can say that 80% of the six-sigma methodology is addressed.

C-D-EC model is based on the lines of six-sigma and addresses the complete DMAIC methodology end-to-end. The engagement starts with the consulting phase (Define-Measure-Analyze) to understand and define the client’s problem, walk-through the client’s existing landscape, measure (quantify) the bottle-necks, and finally analyze the findings by base-lining each identified parameter that is in focus. End of this consulting phase would be the typical recommendations, governance structure, best practices and implementation roadmap.

When the delivery team takes over and completes the implementation based on the proposed recommendations, we can say that the Improve phase of the six-sigma methodology is addressed.

What we have seen till now is what is being followed in the Industry as of today. The Control phase of the six-sigma methodology is either left out completely or addressed in parts through a maintenance and support program. The problem with addressing the control phase through maintenance, and support is that, it takes time to realize the complete benefit of the investment made. Consultants have no way to figure out how effective their recommendation was. For example, the support team can take anywhere between two to five months to just stabilize and familiarize themselves with the environment. This is because the development team normally does not end up as the support team also. Hence, on an average it can take anywhere between four to five months for the support team to figure out possible areas for enhancement and roll it into production. Let’s have a look at how bringing the consulting team back in, post-implementation can reduce this time lag of four to five months and also create some positive impact.

Extended Consulting:
The consulting team is brought back to study the gaps in implementation, understand how the users are interacting with the new setup, collect their feedback and propose an Optimize & Sustain strategy. This could be as simple as tweaking the processes/recommendations proposed initially or bringing in a completely new perspective like a collaboration that could take the entire setup to a completely new level. Under normal circumstances, this extended consulting would lead to the formulation of a continuous, repeatable and robust framework which the client could reuse on a day-to-day basis using its internal team. This fills the missing piece in the six-sigma methodology, the Control phase.

This phase can be included as part of the existing consulting models of various organizations at a small or no cost at all to the client depending on various factors like size of the implementation, relationship with the client, knowledge leveraged, etc.

Benefits of CDEC over CD
As explained earlier, the overall benefit of this model is the ability to Re-assess and re-align the roadmap in large deals, especially roadmaps which are for a period of two years and above. It also gives the ability to fine tune the solution proposed keeping the current market situation in mind.

On the other hand, it gives the consultants and in-road back into the client’s organization to look for new business opportunities and also sustain a long term relationship.

Framework for Extended Consulting
Now that we have brought the consulting team back in, questions like where should one start, how should we go about doing this extended consulting phase, can we follow the same methodology followed initially, etc will arise. One cannot follow the same methodology as it will become an over burden / over doing the whole thing. Hence the ideal answer would be a downplayed version of the original consulting model any vendor follows.

The primary factors, this downplayed version needs to address is given by the ACUTE methodology below.

ACUTE (Analyze, Compare and gather User feedback to Trigger Enhancement)

Analyze
The setup, post implementation is studied at a high level to check for completeness and accuracy with which the implementation has been done. This phase is purely from a technical perspective.

Compare
The details collected in the analyze phase is now compared against the recommendations given. The gaps if any are identified along with possible reasons for the same and impact of each gap identified. It would be an added advantage to interact with the development team(s) directly and get certain clarifications on these possible mismatches.

User Feedback
Key users feedback is collected on parameters like usability, productivity and user friendliness as the primary parameters. Only the actual users of the implementation will be part of this phase.

Trigger Enhancement
This is the phase where the findings from the Compare phase and feedback from users are studied and alternate solutions and/or tweaks to the earlier proposed recommendations/processes wherever required is drafted. In some cases, a re-usable framework customized for the client need can be generated and given to them which their in-house team can leverage.

Thanks to KrishnaKumar who helped me with his valuable feedback to come out with this model.