Buy solutions not time! Lead towards effective and efficient project management.

A lot has been already said on rule No 1: Tell specific enough why to do it! (Do you know how to answer 5 simple Whys; Gimme 5)  and rule No 2: Assign the Right Person to manage the project  (CRO's 50 shades of greatness; Right fish on the hook) in our previous blogs. 

In this one we will focus on external help you get in executing huge cost reduction programs. 

How is it usually done. You hire consultants to help you prepare, plan for and execute the cost reduction program. How? You analyze the situation and benchmark your performance against the competitors to see where are you weak. You identify areas where your performance should be better and to what extent better. Because you hired consultants, they do vast of the work. They are experts in the area, so they should know best, how to handle this things, right? At the end they bring nice wrapped book to the presentation and say: If you do this, your performance in terms of "x" KPI will be better by "y". Nice indeed. One more piece of "shelf-work" it is, because you do not know how to do it. Of course consultants have a solution: a new contract to do the work for you.

Why is this wrong? At the end of the process, in which you were heavily involved only with the operational and administrative tasks (collecting the data, preparing inputs, explaining parts of the situation), you do not have a clue how to proceed forward. You know vaguely what to do, but not how and what exactly. And all you really wanted at the beginning of the process was to come up with a practical program of measures which you could execute by yourselves to be able to achieve the goals. What went wrong? You were involved not commited. You let the consultants to do what they know and not what you need.

What should be done differently? You should make them use their knowledge to satisfy your need! How?

1. Analyzing and benchmarking done together with you. Make sure that you are involved in the cause identification process to be sure that the analysis led to the right causes and what is more important, that the consultants and you understand them in the same way. Understanding the situation is the first point when selecting the appropriate ways to proceed with turning the business around.

2. Reachable goals set. If you leave goal setting to the consultants, make sure that they are working with solid assumptions and your goals are reachable. At the end, they will leave the company, and you will stay to execute what was developed.

3. Detailed cost reduction initiatives developed by you AND consultants together. The proposals for cost reduction initiatives MUST come from inside of the company as they have to be adopted by those who will work and live with them. In case developed by the consultants make sure somebody in the company, who will be responsible for executing them, can and will identify with them.  The consultants should therefore hold your hand during the process and have at least couple of hundred cost reduction measures "on reserve" to support the process of designing the SCORE. To drag them out of their pockets, when you need to get the process going when you are stuck. It is required that draft measures and tools to track and oversee them in execution phase are prepared for every initiative (tables, spreadsheets, procedures, policies, …) as scope of their work, no extras can be tolerated. 

4. Follow the golden rule: Do not allow that consultants earn up-front! They should work hand in hand with you also when executing. Do not let them sell time they spend with you, but solutions they provide you with. They should support you with the implementation until you asses that the critical point was reached and you feel comfortable in doing the program further by yourselves. They should not be hired to prepare a report of 1000 pages, but to assist you in achieving the goals set. And doing ALL of this for the price they stated in the first contract you signed with them. Do not enable finding the reasons for the second and third contract their first priority. It is your money to be invested and therefore your CALL.

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