Round Table: Excellence in Consulting
Are your consultants any good at what they do? If you're a consultant, how do you measure the value you deliver to your clients?
Consultants exist to help their clients improve what they do and therefore should strive to be excellent at this. But how do you define excellence given consulting's rather slippery definition of value?
At CMCE we believe this is one of the fundamental questions the consulting profession needs to address and to kick off a series of events and collaborative work we ran a Round Table discussion with an invited panel and audience. This event discussed the following questions:
- How do you evaluate consultant performance effectively?
- How do you measure the value of consulting?
- How do consultants improve their image when most of their work is hidden from view?
- What is the role of systems / methods/ standards versus freedom to innovate and respond to a changing client agenda?
- How can excellence be better disseminated?
- Is it possible to determine “what is in the best interest of the client”?
- Is there a sense of the optimum balance of how much “external” context consultants should bring vs internal content? (ie how to respond to the classic criticism that consultant’s borrow the client’s watch to tell them the time)
- Are there “hallmarks” or golden questions that clients can use to find the “fit” with the consultants who will make a difference for them? (And are there clear “red flags” to pay attention to?)
You can read a report of the Round Table here.
If you would like to be part of the continuing work on this topic, please get in touch with us at info@cmce.org.uk.
