Keeping your consultants in line

Allan Trench* explains how the way that you work with management consultants will directly influence the results that you will get...

Management consultants are right up there with secondhand car salesmen for trustworthiness and professional reputation as far as some mineral industry managers are concerned.

What's more is that I expect several readers to have heard the old joke about consultants borrowing your watch, telling you the time, and then keeping what's now become their watch afterwards!

Such bad press no doubt has its origin in bad past experiences. But some simple tricks of the trade can stop such bad experiences from happening in the future.

So speaking as a former full-time (and still occasional) consultant, such humour offers no guidance on how to actually succeed with consultants - meaning getting big benefits from them instead of just a big invoice when they leave (here speaking as a mineral industry manager).

There is indeed a tried and trusted way to get great value from consultants: The problem is that not many people know it. The irony is that if only people knew how to work with consultants, they'd hire them more often.

First the good news - the secret to success with management consultants is to keep them in line. Now for the bad news - keeping consultants in line does not mean bossing them about.

What it means is that the activities of the consultants must be absolutely seamless with the activities of line management; that's you.

Get them on to solving the big hitter problems with you, not off somewhere on a project of little relevance (more on that later). Achieve this and you are more than halfway to success.

The consultants know this, or at least the experienced ones do, yet many still make the mistake of getting 'out of line' and ultimately delivering little more than an invoice.

The proof? I stole, with permission, the following rules of engagement from Partners-in-Performance (you guessed it, more consultants, although these guys prefer to call themselves "Resultants" as they stick with the job through implementation).

These rules explain it perfectly – and give away the secrets to success. Put simply, the main secret is keeping your consultants in line: It seems that's where the consultants want to be anyway.

The directors of Partners-in-Performance set their operations-based consultants these rules to drive continuous improvement. So there's actually no need to push consultants around – they already do it to themselves.

1. Don't allow your activities to become a "project": You are there to improve the ongoing work of the line. You can't run continuous improvement as a project. Why? Because the line usually ignores projects – waits for them to end and then resumes "business as usual"

2. Train and coach directly on-the-job: Training people how to run a project does not train them how to do improvement continuously as part of their everyday job. It doesn't train them to free up their diary, walk the floor and run meetings successfully – all vital to driving improvement and maintaining operations.

3. Keep accountability with the line: If you run as a project, the line can consider improvement to be the improvement team's problem. Next, you'll be negotiating with the managers on the basis that they are helping you, they will be thinking up reasons why they can't help you, saying "well, good luck to you, I doubt you'll find anything"!

4. Ensure all reviews are in the line: Reviews must cover all key performance indicators of the line else they are just improvement team reviews and you are not improving how the business is managed.

5. Ensure all targets are assigned and accepted from the line to the line: For example, General Managers should agree targets with managers, and managers with superintendents and so forth. Don't get in the way of this. DO NOT have consultants and improvement people assigning targets: Consultants are accountable for delivering a process that finds enough ideas to meet targets, coaching people on how to evaluate and implement changes. You are not accountable for, nor should take credit for, improvement outcomes.

6. If you're not getting anywhere, check that you are not stuck in a project setting: Ask yourself "whose problem should this be? Nine times out of ten it's a line accountability issue and you are trying to solve it from a project perspective without the authority to do so. It just doesn't work!

So the next time you work with consultants, my advice is to keep them in line. That way you'll get a lot out of them. Don't be tempted to palm them off on to a separate project somewhere, that way you'll get little more than an invoice – and they'll leave with your watch too!

Allan Trench is Adjunct Professor of Mine Management & Mineral Economics, Western Australian School of Mines and is a Non-Executive Director of Heron Resources, Pioneer Nickel and Navigator Resources.

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