In general, I find that management consulting projects benefit from a moderate amount of project management overhead.  The same is not true of many information technology projects, where teams and scope are often much larger and the end deliverable may be much more complex.

What do I mean by a moderate level of overhead?  There are really only three main guidelines that I use for managing project effectively:

Decompose the tricky parts

Any complex task should be broken down into smaller steps so you have more visibility into what really needs to get done.  Even something straightforward like conducting customer interviews involves deciding on a list of contacts, getting introductions, scheduling calls, and summarizing results afterwards.  While that’s an obvious example, it’s far too easy for even basic tasks to slip between the cracks if no one has thought about them explicitly.

Track dependencies

While breaking things down, also think about dependencies.  A certain task could require management or client sign-off, access to certain data or people, or other tasks to be completed first.  During one of my pricing projects for a paper company, one of the big delays was getting IT to run pricing reports before we could even start with most of the work.  Getting data in general can be a big unexpected component of the schedule.  Don’t allow yourself to get too comfortable about the schedule until you’ve identified all of the important dependencies because short tasks that need to be done in a certain sequence can quickly become bottlenecks and wreck the schedule.

Maintain accountability

Assign all tasks to people explicitly, and make sure that you’re communicating with them clearly.  Otherwise, you run the risk that everyone will assume it was someone else’s job, which increases the risk of problems.  Each team member should be fully aware of their assignments, the timing for them, and all of the relevant dependencies.

In general, you should have a plan of attack for the entire project and know how far along you should be at a given time.  If you end up flying too much by the seat of the pants, symptoms include last-minute crunches, more stress for the team, and a higher risk that the project will fail.

On the other hand, if you feel like you spend a day every week updating the project plan, you may have too much overhead.  If your project planning spreadsheet has hundreds of lines, you either have an extremely complex project, or perhaps you’re being too detail-oriented and need think about some tasks at a higher level of abstraction.  Constantly adjusting the start and end times for different tasks and updating information that will have little effect on how work is accomplished can be a big time sink.  It can also be very frustrating for everyone on the team because of the inefficiency involved.

The 80/20 rule

Most people have heard about the 80/20 rule (otherwise known as the Pareto rule), but it’s often ignored in practice.  Consultants in particular, myself included, often have a hard time not throwing every analysis and every recommendation against the wall.  Throughout your work, always ask yourself what will truly make the biggest difference and focus on that.  Do your best to ignore other issues, or at least put them in an appendix (literally and figuratively) where they won’t distract people from the top priorities.

Be skeptical

I’ve come to realize that whenever I come up with an amazing conclusion while working on a project, there’s about a 50% chance that it’s an error.  It could be due to bad data, a spreadsheet goof, or just not fully understanding the context of the situation.  So, the more astounding your conclusion is, the more you should treat it with skepticism.  Double-check your work and try to poke holes in your logic.  There’s nothing worse than showing off your idea to your boss or client as a crowning achievement only to realize that it’s just a mistake.

The same is true when talking to people.  Everyone in an organization has an agenda (shocking, I know), and many of them will try to feed you biased information to support their cause.  The more you want to believe it because it’s “interesting,” the most you should take it with a grain of salt and try to confirm it.

Correlation does not imply causation

When I show a number based on customer interviews to clients, one of the questions they like to ask is whether it’s statistically significant.  It’s not a bad question to ask, but if often misses the bigger point.  The biggest risk isn’t that you don’t have enough data points, it’s that there’s some confounding factor that’s the true cause rather than the data you’re analyzing.  Like epidemiology, business analysis is messy, and it’s very tough to be sure you know the real cause of something based on statistics.  Look at the data, but don’t forget to rely on judgment as well.

Unintended consequences

Always ask yourself how recommendations may play out in real life differently from how you have planned.  People will always try to game the system, and any change will almost certainly have unintended consequences.  If salespeople get quarterly bonuses, you can be sure that some of them will knock it out of the park for three quarters, make enough money to be happy, and then mail it in the fourth quarter.  If you offer customers a service for free, they will often use it even if they don’t really need it.  Anticipating these consequences is by definition difficult.  Rather than trying to eliminate them, try to make sure you can live with the ones that seem most likely.

The initial reaction to unintended consequences is to try to make processes more complicated to keep people from gaming the system.  Unfortunately, that often does not work, confuses people, and results in a more bureaucratic organization.  Which leads me to my next point.

Complexity cost

For every bright idea you come up with, consider the level of effort people will need to go through to comply with it, not just the financial cost.  The ultimate example of ignoring the cost of complexity is the IRS tax code, which single-handedly keeps millions of people employed dealing with its more byzantine aspects.  Don’t create industries within your company or your clients’ companies devoted to adhering to your processes unless it’s truly worth the cost.  If your recommendations do add a significant amount of complexity, perhaps you need to figure out a way to simplify other processes in order to keep things in balance.

Of course, this isn’t intended to be an exhaustive list.  What other rules of thumb do you keep in mind when thinking about business problems?

Practice

Rehearsing a presentation beforehand is probably the single most important thing you can do if you want to be a great presenter.  You’ll be less nervous, more articulate, and better able to focus on the audience’s reaction instead of what to say next.  As you practice, you’ll also notice parts of the presentation that need to be revised, something that often is not apparent until you actually deliver it.  I tend to skip the practice, and a result many of my presentations in the past have been just a notch above mediocre.

Ideally, you should practice in front of someone.  Failing that, record and critique yourself.  The iPhone’s voice memo feature is excellent for this approach.  Video is even better, so get a Flip camcorder.

Rehearse using the same format in which you’ll be presenting (e.g., paper document, projector).

Be energetic and vary tone and pacing

If you sound bored or tentative, that message will override anything you actually say.  So as trite as it sounds, make sure to project enthusiasm.  In an appropriate way, of course – no one wants a cheerful discussion of layoffs.  Change up your speed, and especially try to slow down for important points to let them sink in.  Also make sure you have some inflection in your voice.  These aspects are difficult to master without practice, so refer back to my previous point about recording yourself.

Ask for questions

If the audience is quiet during the talk, stop at a couple of points and ask whether they have questions.  The best presentations are discussions rather than monologues, and a disengaged audience may not understand or agree with your points.  Best to get those issues out in the open.  Of course, individual questions may not be feasible if there are more than 10-15 people in the audience, unless they’re part of a separate Q&A session.

Speak off the page

Please do not read from the document.  Nothing is more painful for the audience to sit through.  In fact, you should think of your talk as covering the main points on the page but overall being more like color commentary.  When getting ready for a presentation, I jot down 2-3 points per page to make sure to cover, and some of them may not be written in the document at all.

Decide whether it’s a presentation or a deliverable

In contrast to a keynote presentation, where the slides have been pared down to the minimum and may just have a few words of text on the page, most consulting presentations are rather wordy, crowded affairs.  The presentation doubles as the leave-behind deliverable, so it has to convey most of the information in text.  Also, most consultants are habitually averse to leaving out any three-syllable words that might make their ideas seem more sophisticated.

I won’t really criticize this approach because I do it as well.  However, you should make sure to send the document to the client at least 24 hours in advance, preferably more, to give them time to review it.  Don’t make them struggle with trying to read it while you’re presenting.

Have someone proofread the document

Enough said.

Think about the storyline

Every presentation places the main point or conclusion either at the beginning (often in a one-page executive summary) or at the end.  Stating the conclusion up-front is helpful if the audience is short on time or attention span (like many senior executives).  Waiting until the end allows you to build up to your conclusion with supporting evidence and analysis, which may be better for a skeptical audience or controversial point.  It can also be good for building up some dramatic tension.  Either way is fine, just make a conscious choice based on the situation.

Those are my main points.  What would you add to the list?

Painstaking analysis

A lot of businesses are run on gut feel.  Even at large corporations with massive reporting and analysis resources, there is a limit to how much analysis can be run and to how much executive time can be spent understanding it.  Consultants are most valuable when they help you shortcut this constraint.  I’ve heard war stories where consultants from high-powered firms have spent weeks driving around town to understand soda delivery routes and territory assignments, logging airline arrivals and departures to assess the best gate patterns, and talking to hundreds of building contractors to analyze buying behavior for garage doors.  Consultants are used to drilling down much deeper on topics than your team is, and they put highly capable people on it because brilliant insights can come out of this mind-numbing analysis if done well.

In a nutshell, a good consulting team will run through more data hoops than your internal team and do it faster.  They can help you understand aspects of your business that were never clear before.

Domain expertise

Domain expertise simply means experience in either an industry or a functional area (e.g., marketing, supply chain management, merger integration).  Consultants often over-sell this quality.  Trust me, the team may have only done one project like yours before, but they will be sold as experts.

If you truly need domain expertise, you should do some due diligence on this point.  Make sure you know the specific team that will be working on the project, and go through the background of at least the partner and manager in some detail.  Ask probing questions about previous projects or about industry trends to identify the ones who have really walked the walk.

For reliable domain expertise, solo consultants who were formerly executives in the industry, as well as professors in a field, can make excellent choices.  But you may find you don’t need as much expertise in a subject as you thought.  Sheer intellectual horsepower is often more important – mediocre consultants with a lot of industry experience often just end up recycling the same ideas.

Objectivity

People like to talk about consultants being objective, which I think combines a few different concepts.  One, they’re likely to come in with a fresh perspective, questioning things that people inside the company take for granted.  Two, they see the big picture across departmental priorities and can help facilitate the organization to agreement on a strategy.  Three, they are in a better position to be the bad guy and call BS on internal constituencies based on deeper data and analysis, if it comes down to it.

Of course, in some situations consultants are just brought in to rubber stamp someone’s pet strategy.  I’ll go into that in another post on the dangers of using consultants.

Better information

Whether talking to customers or people inside the company, consultants will likely get more unvarnished information from them.  Why?  Because people are much more honest with a third party.  They don’t want to criticize you to your face, get their salesperson in trouble, or risk some kind of reprisal.  Consultants also spend their entire careers interviewing people for information, and they get pretty good at it.

Speed

Finally, consultants can help increase the speed of change in your organization.  Most organizations, especially large ones, suffer from a certain amount of inertia.  People are comfortable doing things the same way every day, and they may not even know how to change and how to coordinate those changes across the company.  Consultants can help figure out what’s blocking change, come up with a detailed plan for how to fix it, and work with you to execute on that plan in a way that makes sense for the business.  They are used to moving big ships to different courses and understand the level of planning and communication required.

Of course, not all of these points hold true for all consultants.  Some firms have a bias towards exhaustive analysis and strategy discussions, others towards managing execution and keeping the organization on the same page.  Depending on what you need, you should emphasize the aspects that will be most important.  But I’m curious to hear from your – do these generalizations hold true in your experience?