Month: September 2013

Capability growth, Observations2 Comments

Defining the value or your internal consulting team part 3 – reviewing your services

James King

In my last couple of articles I described a rough process for creating a value proposition for an internal consulting team. To do this I used “Sophie” and her mythical business analyst team as an example.

Now we are going to go one step further. Sophie can already explain the services her team offers, but now she needs to assess how well the team can provide those services.

Our high level approach

In order to assess the services that the team offers, Sophie will assess:

  • The stakeholders or “customers” who use them;
  • The actual service and whether to measure it;
  • The current and future demand for the service and the number of people in the team who can provide the service;
  • The skills needed to deliver the service at the appropriate level of quality; and
  • The tools and partners the team can use to be better at delivering the service or at smoothing supply and demand.

Continue reading “Defining the value or your internal consulting team part 3 – reviewing your services”

Implementation, Leading change, Observations1 Comment

Defining the value of your internal consulting team part 2 – your services

James King

In my last article, I described an approach that you can use to define the purpose of an internal consulting team.

I used Sophie and her BA team as an example and I will continue to do so here. This time I will talk about the “Service catalogue” or list of services that your team provides to stakeholders in the business.

Our approach at a high level

Sophie and her managers have just defined what their team’s purpose is, so it should be easy to create a list of the services that be needed to achieve that purpose. But in reality, a lot of the work done by internal teams is “as per the stakeholder’s request” and not at all aligned to the team’s alleged reason for existence. So we will attack this problem from two angles

  • What Sophie and her managers think the team should be doing; and
  • What the team are actually doing at the moment.

We will then look at the gap and work out what to do about it.

Sorry, but it turns out to be a long article, so pour a cup of tea for yourself or just read one heading at a time.

Continue reading “Defining the value of your internal consulting team part 2 – your services”

Capability growth, Observations3 Comments

Defining the brand and value of your internal consulting team – part 1

James King

I am just moving back into consulting after a 2 year gig as a CTO. So people are already asking me about the brand, services and focus of my consulting company. I guess it is time to start creating my value proposition, visual language and case studies so that I can get back into marketing. Instead I am spending a little time with my wife and daughter and planning to do all that thinking in the lead up to Christmas, when things are usually a little slow in Australia.

But what about internal consulting teams? They sometimes compete with me for work and I even get asked to do things that someone in-house would do much better than an external consultant like me. So why do people often go outside for services that they can obtain in-house?
Continue reading “Defining the brand and value of your internal consulting team – part 1”