[IxDA Discuss] Bringing on a Consulting Group

[Chris Bernard]

Some quick thoughts.

Consultancies are great for saying things that you know (and say) but actually get other people to pay attention too. Take advantage of this if you hire one.

Issue 1. This is all about chemistry and understanding the business model of whomever you're dealing with. Their goal is mostly like to generate more business out of you and establish themselves in a trusted advisor relationship. If you want to get their best you need to understand what incentives they are operating against and reward accordingly (For example, you're project may be small and finite but perhaps there's other business areas in your company where this group can play, manage those interactions.)

Issue 2. If you're on this list you now that most of the companies that operate in this space probably focus on being collaborative already. Culturally you're looking for a company that can 'teach you to hunt' in addition to doing all the work for you. Does the company you're hiring have someone in charge of practice development? Do they talk about knowledge transfer in their approaches. Are they looking for joint leadership and accountability in their proposal? You may want to ask for a proposed or typical work breakdown structure that details how these interactions occur and how the 'soft' parts of project management are handled, including issue resolution and escalation. Also figure out if most of the work is going to be on your work site or theirs. Big box consultancies typically work on site (or are demanded to for this reason). Smaller firms often don't. If the company is going to work in a hybrid fashion (with a mix of onsite, offsite and field interactions) it's really critical that you evaluate the proposed work structure before making a hiring decision. Even go so far as to speak to some of their other customers.

Issue 3. Is very much related to one. Understand their incentive structure and see how you can play with it and reward their business model. If it's not a good fit for what you really want you may want to consider bring in contractors versus a bigger firm. But also be realistic too, in today's markets the best firms are being picking and choosy about the work that they take on. Be honest about what you need and don't just engage with the business development and account managers up front. See if you can intuit how the people that will 'work' the project will engage too.

Chris Bernard
Microsoft
User Experience Evangelist
chris.bernard at microsoft.com
312.925.4095



Blog: www.designthinkingdigest.com
Design: www.microsoft.com/design
Tools: www.microsoft.com/expression

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com [mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com] On Behalf Of Joe Davidchik
Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2007 1:09 PM
To: discuss at ixda.org
Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Bringing on a Consulting Group

Could use some advice here.

Our Sr. Management group has decided to bring on an outside consulting
group to "help" with our product/information architecture. I will
purposely not give out the name of the group since you who are reading
this might be working for them.

We currently have a team of 5 UI/Interaction Designers, 1 UX Manager
(research guy), and about 8 or so Business Analysts.

So where I am asking for advice/guidance/input are in the following

1.      How I can help steer the relationship on both sides so we don't
have folks pissing each other off?
2.      How can I get the consulting group work in a more collaborate
structure, rather then just meeting to get inputs and then running up
the mountain themselves  to work out the solutions?
3.      Long term we look to be very self supportive. Consulting like
everything else is a business. What should we do in this world to keep
from building up a relationship of dependency?

-Joe
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