When to bring in a consultant

Consultants are easy to hire and harder to use well. Some engagements give an organisation exactly what it needed at the right moment. Others produce a report that is read once, a set of recommendations that nobody owns and an invoice that is hard to justify afterwards.

The difference usually depends on whether external help was the right choice in the first place, and on how the organisation managed the work. This post looks at both, as plainly as we can, given that we are a consultancy ourselves.

When external help is useful

There are situations where an outside adviser adds something the organisation cannot easily provide on its own.

• You need capacity for a defined period. A major change, an acquisition or a strategy process can demand more hours than the leadership team has. Temporary help lets the organisation keep running while the extra work gets done.
• You need skills you will not need permanently. Some tasks require experience that is valuable for a few months and then rarely used. Hiring for it would be wasteful.
• You need a neutral voice. When a decision affects several departments, or when internal positions have hardened, a person without a stake in the outcome can run a fairer process. People often speak more openly to someone outside the line of management.
• You need a fresh view. Organisations develop habits of thought. An outsider can ask the obvious questions that insiders have stopped asking.
• You need structure. Sometimes the knowledge is all inside the organisation, but nobody has the time or mandate to pull it together. A consultant can design and facilitate the process that does that.

When you should do it yourself

There are also clear cases where external help is the wrong choice.

• The work is core to your organisation. If a capability is central to how you create value, you need to own it. Bringing in outsiders to do it for you may delay the moment you build it yourselves.
• You already know the answer. If the leadership team has made its decision and wants a report to support it, that is a poor use of money. It also tends to be visible to staff, which erodes trust.
• Nobody internally will own the result. If no one has the time, authority or interest to carry the work forward, the recommendations will not be implemented. Fix that first.
• What is missing is a decision. Sometimes the facts are clear and what is missing is a leader willing to choose. No amount of external analysis will substitute for that.
• The task is small and well understood. Many improvements can be made by a capable internal team with a clear mandate and some protected time.

In Nordic workplaces, where employees expect to be involved and trusted, there is an additional reason to think carefully. Handing a problem to outsiders can send a message to staff that their knowledge is not valued. Done well, external help strengthens internal capability. Done badly, it bypasses it.

Getting value from a consultant

If you decide to bring in outside help, the way you set up and run the engagement matters as much as who you hire.

1. Define the problem before you define the work. Write down what you want to be different when the engagement ends. Be specific. "A strategy" is vague. "An agreed set of three priorities for the next two years, with owners and budgets" is clear.
2. Name an internal owner. One person should be responsible for the engagement, with the authority to make decisions and the time to stay involved.
3. Insist on working together. The most useful engagements mix external and internal people in the same team. Your staff learn the methods, and the consultants learn the context. When the engagement ends, the knowledge stays.
4. Agree how you will know it worked. Set a few clear outcomes and check them at agreed points.
5. Keep it short and staged. Start with a defined first phase. Decide on the next phase based on what you learned. Long open-ended engagements tend to drift.
6. Ask for plain language. Recommendations should be understandable to the people who will carry them out. If you cannot explain a recommendation to your team, it is not ready.
7. Plan the handover from the start. Agree what the organisation should be able to do on its own afterwards, and build that into the work.

Questions to ask before you sign

A short checklist can help you decide:

• What exactly will be different when this is finished?
• Who on our side will own the result?
• Could we do this ourselves with more time or a clearer mandate?
• What will our people learn from the work?
• How will we know whether it was worth the cost?

If the answers are clear, external help is likely to be a good investment. If they are not, it may be better to spend a little more time internally before bringing anyone in.

Good consulting should leave an organisation more capable and less dependent. At Linje, we try to work in that spirit of dugnad, alongside our clients, and we would encourage any organisation to expect the same from whoever it chooses to work with.