Steering Your Consulting Project To Success
I found your firm’s approach to optimizing our operations to be refreshing, and extremely powerful in how it generates bottom-line results. The operations team now has new tools and reports to view productivity, cost, speed, service and quality in real-time, and the speed at which these tools were developed and rolled out was impressive.
- A FORTUNE 500 COMPANY
When leading their organization into a
consulting engagement, it’s important for executives to realize that they play
a key role in ensuring the project has a successful outcome. Hiring a firm with an established track
record like Trindent is a large part of achieving the results you want to see,
but it’s not the whole picture.
When it comes to our engagements, Trindent has built a strong and proven project methodology. But even with our solid approach, there are components that clients need to take the lead on to ensure the overall success of the engagement.
Here are 3 elements that clients should be
mindful of when working with consultants.
Logistics
Consultants need a physical location to
have a base of operations. Without an
assigned workspace, it becomes difficult to get focused, be creative, and become
productive. Ideally, the workspace
should also facilitate meetings, so that consultants don’t needlessly spend time
moving around with every client team and stakeholder meeting that’s planned.
Stress-free communication is the second piece of the logistics puzzle. When working onsite, consultants need to quickly be able to book meetings, set up process observations, host agile think tank session to generate ideas, develop process changes, and present to management. For this, Trindent recommends clients set up an internal email address for their consultants, giving them visibility to schedules and enabling them to easily book time with client teams. Alternately, if the client has enough resources, having an administrative support person made available to the consulting team is an excellent way to facilitate scheduling.
The last important part of logistics is
access to data. Access to data is imperative
as it gives consultants ability to quickly and efficiently perform required analysis. Lack of proper access to data can quickly
become a bottleneck in project delivery. The optimal set up Trindent recommends is
give consultants access to retrieve the data on an internal computer, instead
of asking them to rely on making requests and waiting for data to be brought to
them.
Execution
Each engagement has a project plan that
outlines its scope. Following the
project plan is key to preventing deviation from final project objectives. Here, the client can either become the
roadblock to smooth execution, or its protector.
“Scope-creep” commonly occurs when too many secondary ideas are spawned from the initial primary project outline. As the secondary ideas begin to add up and divergence from the original project plan becomes recurring, the time and effort spent on out-of-scope work leads to an increasing amount of lost time. Missed deadlines and project delays are the inevitable result of a client’s inability to control that scope-creep.
Resource allocation is another key aspect
of execution that consultant rely on the client to deliver. Required client resources are agreed to and are
built into the project plan before consultants are deployed. If those resources are not provided as
promised, it poses a threat to project success as work must be redistributed on
the fly, or timelines must be pushed out.
Client resources must also be the right
ones. Project success relies on the
assignment of resources who are strong performers rather than poor ones, so
assigning the right talent becomes extremely important.
Sponsorship Participation
In any organization, it’s important for
change to start at the top. When it
comes to project success, executives need to set the tone early and lead by
example.
During Trindent engagements, recurring
update meetings are attended by project sponsors as a way of instilling their
leadership team with confidence in the work.
In the absence of the sponsor’s ongoing participation, organizational
buy-in falters, and company leaders become loath to make necessary decisions or
provide support when its most needed.
Simply signing off on the project launch is
not enough to guarantee the success of the project. It requires effort to get and maintain buy-in
from an organization’s leadership team and staff. By actively ensuring that variables within
your control – logistics, communication, participation – are met, you have the
power to steer the project to a successful conclusion.
Asking The Right Questions
Asking Questions is at the core of the work a consultant does. At its most basic level, a question is a sentence structured and worded in a way that elicits information. A consultant’s key objective is to understand their client’s situation so that they can expose the underlying problems, come up with solutions, and facilitate their clients’ path to improvement. This means taking the time to understand the issues clients are facing as well as their current reality and their vision for the future – and what is required to help them advance from the former to the latter. Asking the right questions will pave the way.
The
Importance of Good Questions
The skillful use of questions is
one of consulting’s most important tools. Asking the right questions to the right person at the right time not only builds the
client-consultant relationships, it also:
- Provides the consultant with crucial information
- Encourages the client to think of ideas they would not have otherwise
come to - Helps the client clarify their own thinking
- Fosters conversation and robust communication between consultant
and client to come to a common and proper understanding of current states and
goals
However, there is a flip side to this: The wrong question is almost always guaranteed
to generate the wrong answer. And the
right question asked at the wrong time or to the wrong person can equally be of
no value.
Knowing the Right Questions to Ask
Knowing the right questions to ask will always enhance a
consultant’s performance on any engagement and deliver sustainable benefits for
their clients.
What the “right” questions are will be determined in large
part by the information a consultant needs to elicit. Depending on the circumstances of the engagement, consultants
may want to clarify their understanding of an issue, explore some specific
aspects of that issue, conduct a deeper dive into the details of the issue, or
zoom out to get a bigger picture of the context around the issue.
“You can tell a clever man by his answers and a wise man by his questions.”
– Naguib Mahfouz
Getting to the right questions doesn’t have to
be difficult. Using the 5Ws
& H to gather basic information, or the
5 Whys to determine
the root cause of a problem are two simple techniques to structure questions
that will yield an abundance of the right information.
Top consultants understand the more they can
uncover about their clients’ situation through questioning, the more they will
be able to help, but without the right information, they cannot effectively do their
job.
Interested in learning more in asking Trindent the right questions? Click here for our current job openings.
The author of this blog Megan Webb is a Consultant at Trindent.
What is Kanban?
Kanban, the Japanese word for “billboard”, is
a visual method for managing work as it flows through a process. Originally developed to do scheduling in the
manufacturing sector, it’s now a Lean management tool being utilized across all
industries to visualize and actively manage work in order to optimize
productivity.
It’s also a common tool used by management
consultants as their approach to client engagements.
Why Kanban?
With so many tools out there, why do consulting companies like Trindent choose Kanban? It may not seem obvious, but the four foundational principles of Kanban are already found in most process improvement methodologies. Though they might seem minor, each one of these principles provides a part of the basis for any successful organizational change.
The four principles of the Kanban methodology:
- Start with what you are doing now.
- Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change.
- At the beginning, respect current roles, responsibilities, and job titles.
- Encourage acts of leadership at all levels.
How Are These Principles Woven into Process
Improvement?
In using the Kanban approach, visually mapping the current workflow – what is being done now – gives consultants the opportunity to step back and see the big picture before jumping into making changes. This helps to clearly identify improvement opportunities and shows what possible inter dependencies within the process need to be kept in mind. It also provides a comprehensive baseline against which future workflows can be measured once implemented.
With a
list of opportunities in place, the next step for consultants is to decide how
to go about implementing them. Agreement
to pursue incremental, evolutionary change allows an
engagement team to get to their overall improvement goals by finding “quick
wins” with small, manageable changes that don’t seem overwhelming, which helps
drive employee engagement and maintain program momentum.
When working
through improvement opportunities, engagement teams should, at the
beginning, respect current roles, responsibilities, and job titles to minimize
the potential for resistance from those effected by change. As the program gains momentum and employee
buy-in grows, this principle can – and should – be reduced.
By
inviting input from all levels of the organization to identify and implement
improvement efforts – and encouraging acts of leadership at all levels –
the Kanban approach encourages employee engagement and support, and ultimate drives
buy-in for change. With this buy-in,
continuous improvement becomes ingrained into the culture of an organization,
which in turn helps create an environment where improvement benefits can be
sustained.
“Brown Paper Process” – a Kanban Tool
Embodying the four foundational principles
of Kanban, Trindent uses a method called the “Brown
Paper Process and System Map”. It’s a simple but creative way to involve all
levels of staff to help visualize the current workflow and show opportunities
for incremental change.
How does it work? A large piece of wall-sized brown
paper is hung in a high traffic area to be used as the process flow background. Using color coded sticky notes to highlight
process strengths and opportunities, the “Brown Paper Process” creates a collaborative
forum to produce and display a map of the end-to-end current process.
What are the advantages? The public location and interactive format allow
staff at all levels to feel engaged and encourages them to provide input. The end product provides a compelling visual that
displays the current processes – showcasing its strengths and opportunities. The opportunities identified from the “Brown
Paper Process” are then used to create a log or “to do list” of potential
changes that can be made continuously over a pre-determined
period of time at a pace that is comfortable for the teams.
Seeing the Opportunities in
Consulting
A Kanban-based approach creates the means
to visualize and actively manage work in order to optimize productivity. Consulting teams can see the current state
through the eyes of their client’s staff, which they can use to more
effectively identify viable continuous improvement opportunities. The interactive format enables early
buy-in for change and amplified support for implementation and sustainment of a
continuous improvement initiative.
At Trident, we work with all levels of client
staff to ensure that processes, system and behavioral improvements become
firmly rooted in your organization to ensure sustainability of benefits. Click here
to learn more.
Value Stream Mapping Your Way Out of Waste
No one likes waste, but the question is,
what the best way to get rid of it? The
answer is Lean, whose fundamental objective is to create maximum value through
the elimination of waste. In essence,
finding processes to get things done with less effort, less time, and fewer
resources.
Originally conceived in post-war Japan by a Toyota engineer to reduce waste in operations while exceeding quality, the concept eventually became the Lean methodology as we know it. Today, Lean is not only synonymous with manufacturing but across all industries, including management consulting. Lean concepts are valued in management consulting, as their goals are identical – identifying and reducing waste while exceeding quality within their clients’ operations.
Principles of Lean
With continuous improvement in mind, Lean
is broken into five principles.
- Define value – from the viewpoint of the customer or client, meeting their needs at specified price and time
- Map the value stream – create a map of current state, categorizing any waste and listing future states
- Create flow – after removing waste, make the remaining steps flow
- Establish pull – reacting to customer or client demand
- Pursuit of perfection – there is always room for continuous improvement when it comes to reducing time, cost, and effort.
Lean is a cyclic process. In seeking continuous improvement (the 5th principle) you are brought back to the beginning of the process of defining value. As processes evolve, new forms of waste can be identified, and the cycle continues infinitely.
There are numerous tools that can be used to support the Lean cycle, including 5S organization Kaizen, Kanban, FOCUS PDCA, and Value Stream Mapping.
Value Stream Mapping
While
some Lean tools are more appropriate for one industry over another, Value
Stream Mapping is commonly used across all industries as it directly relates to
specific principles of Lean to map the value stream and create flow.
To give context to how Lean process improvement principles are used within the lifecycle of a process improvement engagement, we can look at how Value Stream Mapping is used during Trindent’s approach.
Starting
with an opportunity assessment, Value Stream Mapping allows a consulting team
to create a detailed visualization of all the steps in the client’s work
process, showing areas where the process can be improved by visualizing both
its value adding and non-value adding (wasteful) steps. By mapping the value stream, the engagement team
is able to visualize the entire process, see the challenges, and develop a
clear action plan with a path to meet improvement targets. During an engagement, Value Stream Mapping
provides the foundation to remove waste and to create flows that achieve
business improvement objectives.
Learn more about how Trindent uses Value Stream Mapping and other Lean process improvement tools, paired with our industry specific expertise as a proven path to successfully tackle the challenge of waste.
Forward to Basics
The expression “back to basics”
suggests there is an advantage to focusing on simple, fundamental ideas before getting
wrapped up in new, overly complicated ones.
In today’s business world, there’s no shortage of new, refined, or re-purposed methods, practices, principles, tools, and techniques in every industry. However, when communicating and making business decisions, it’s important not to lose touch with what’s tried-and-true.
Often, in pursuit of innovation, businesses will over-complicate
solutions or get distracted by new and trendy approaches with all their
accompanying promises, bells and whistles.
So, when an organization finds itself struggling to address a problem,
or getting lost in a complicated approach, it’s a good idea to come back to
basics – or perhaps more appropriately, forward
to basics.
To Use the Basics, Remember the 5 Ws and H
No matter the size or nature of a task, when defining its requirements
and determining its roadmap, it pays to start with the 5Ws and H. This is the best way to ensure that
the context of the task is understood, and all its relevant requirements captured,
and subsequently communicated effectively.
What are the basics?
- Why – defines the needs, issues or opportunities being contemplated.
- What – identifies the functionalities, inputs, outputs, and
deliverables. - Who – establishes the key stakeholders, including RACI parties; who
is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. - When – sets the timelines for the outcome, including milestones,
activities, and follow-ups. - Where – deals with the geographic and/or logistical aspects of the process.
- How – deals with the deployment of methods, practices, tools and
techniques... and comes after the 5 Ws have been answered.
The Basics in
Action: Why, What by Who, When, Where
and How
To demonstrate forward to basics in action,
let’s look at how managers can use the 5Ws and H to give their teams clear and
unambiguous parameters around a certain task.
Active managers recognize the importance of clear communication in
delegating tasks and maximizing team productivity. Keeping the basics in mind when managing
teams can make an immeasurable difference to how well a team can function. It’s a straightforward way to ensure everyone
understands what is expected of them and alleviates the need to interpret
unclear instructions that inevitably leads to re-work or follow up.
In
our sample scenario, a manager is asked to track their team’s hours. Putting the basics into action, the manager
can easily and clearly communicate “why, what by who, when, where, and how”:
- Manager
is required to report to their Senior Manager the hours billed to a project by
individual team members daily so that the Senior Manager can stay up to date on
costs (why tasks are being done). - Manager
creates a report to track daily hours by individual team members, ensures team
members submits their hours, generates and submits the report; team members
submit their hours; Senior Manager receives the report and uses the information
to stay up to date (what are the tasks) - Manager,
team members, Senior Manager (who is involved) - Individual
hours are submitted by end of day; the report is compiled and submitted by noon
next day (when do tasks occur) - All
tasks are completed online (where do tasks occur) - Individual
hours are input into a company intranet site, which also generates the
report. The report is submitted via
email (how tasks are to be done)
The
example clearly illustrates how the basics in action create a straightforward
and easy to understand path to the completion of a necessary task, without any
ambiguity that can lead to guessing and waste.
Use the
Basics to Move Forward in Consulting
The 5Ws
and H approach is simple, effective, and proven – and should be an essential tool
in every consultant’s toolbox. Using it
as guide for engagements tasks and incorporating it into
your communication with your team and
your clients will make you more effective as a consultant.
Consultants
have any number of new, sophisticated, and intricate tools and methodologies at
their disposal, but this tried and true one will always keep you moving
forward.
Refinery Maintenance Best Practices
Two common expense reduction
strategies that companies in any industry often pursue are abandoning long-term
projects and cutting corners, but both are a mistake.
In refineries, one of these mistakes is often made by reducing one of the largest operating expenses – preventative maintenance costs. Refinery maintenance costs are broken-down into preventative and reactive. Preventative maintenance costs are costs associated with activities to prevent equipment failures, and reactive maintenance costs are the costs incurred after a failure has occurred.
When preventative maintenance costs are cut, even though these cuts may be well intentioned, their impact can have long-term negative consequences. Reactive maintenance is commonly found to be three to ten times more expensive than proactive maintenance, and results in unplanned outages and overtime. For a refinery, this translates into higher than needed operating expenses, a culture of distrust towards planning activities, and a feeling of being overwhelmed. Cutting costs associated with proactive maintenance ultimately increases equipment failures and overall maintenance costs.
At Trindent Consulting we suggest a more targeted approach. We focus on actions that reduce reactive maintenance and increase Overall Equipment Effectiveness. We assist companies to establish well-defined Asset Performance Management programs that typically include:
- Defect Elimination – Defining the guiding principles for investigation selection and approach for identifying the root causes of failures to prevent reoccurrence.
- Work Management – Establishing Standard Operating Procedures for prioritizing preventative and reactive work orders and managing the work order backlog.
- Refining Preventative Maintenance Strategies – Optimizing existing Preventative Maintenance Programs to the proper activities, frequency, and detail required for effective work order completion.
- Inventory Management – Balancing an inventory to ensure that it is lean and manageable but preventing the need for rushed orders.
To
identify if your organization may be suffering from over-reliance on reactive
maintenance, consider the following questions:
- How much production was
lost in the last year due to unplanned outages? - How many safety
incidents occurred in the last year due to equipment failures? - In the last year, what
proportion of maintenance work was planned versus unplanned? - How many weeks behind is
the work backlog? - How many overtime hours
were there in the last year?
If
any of these questions are unanswerable, or the answer to any of these
questions makes you feel uncomfortable, then it is a good time for an objective
third-party review. Trindent offers
in-depth assessments of a company’s status quo and identifies behavioural,
process, and systematic challenges within an organization.
To learn more about how Trindent can Make it Happen in your company, reach out to our team on LinkedIn or through our Contact Us page.
This blog is authored by James Greey, a Senior Consultant at Trindent Consulting.
Measures to Implement a Sustainability Strategy
In every engagement, sustainability is a crucial factor that decides the fate of a project’s success. Installing a comprehensive Sustainability Plan ensures a smooth transition to the client and makes sure that there is no lost knowledge during the period. The significance of having a solid sustainability plan becomes evident towards the later phase of a project when the client starts to take over the responsibilities and accountabilities for project activities.
In a typical Oil & Gas engagement for gasoline
blending optimization, a project team consists of members from the refinery that
have a unified commitment to continuously improve blending strategies to reduce
quality gasoline giveaway. Each department tackles inefficiencies that come
down to improving blend scheduling and prediction accuracy, blend execution
accuracy, and analyzer measurement and testing accuracy. All the installed
processes, systems and behavioral changes will revolve around these
workstreams. With multiple stakeholders involved, there are measures one should
take towards the final phases of the engagement to ease the transition process
for the client once the engagement is complete. This includes putting together
a comprehensive framework for clients to follow as well as install tools to aid
the review process.
Implementing a Sustainability Review Process:
It is crucial to have a recurring review process in place to ensure all the installed changes are sustained and improved by the client when necessary. Referred to as a sustainability meeting, this crucial step acts as a platform to review the current performance of the refinery with respect to the established KPIs to revisit baseline and targets to establish new goals as part of continuous improvement, and to develop action items for initiatives that can further help achieve project goals.
Design and Implementation of the following tools can further
aid the sustainment of project activities and improve client engagement during
discussions:
- Performance Monitoring Dashboard: To highlight the weekly and seasonal trends for overall KPIs.
- Financial Evaluation: To track the project benefits/savings with respect to the baseline on a cumulative and annualized basis and determine a project’s overall success.
- KPI Grid: To provide a high-level overview of the KPIs and compare them to the current performance to baseline and targets.
- Action Log to capture action items discussed during the meetings with clear responsibilities and due dates set for each action.
Post-engagement Sustainability Monitoring:
Once an engagement is complete and the client team takes ownership of all the project activities, they can follow the framework provided in the sustainability plan to ensure a continuous flow of activities. This includes the continuation of the sustainability meeting where all stakeholders involved would engage on a frequent basis and maintaining a Sustainability Scorecard to guide the meeting and provide a checklist for the client team to review and discuss all installed changes. Continued use of the Action Log to discuss action items can promote a culture of continuous improvement in the client environment. In addition, it is essential to have frequent recurring touchpoints with the client to ensure all activities and improvements are well sustained.
The author of this blog - Ajay Ramanujam is a senior consultant at Trindent Consulting.
Blog post photo courtesy of tableatny via Flikr
Cycle Stock and Its Role in Inventory Management
In today’s marketplace, deciding how much inventory to carry is by no means a simple task. With the growth of eCommerce and a competitive international trading scene, inventory managers are finding it harder to make accurate projections to stock their inventories. In such a scenario, we are seeing more project managers depending on safety stock instead of maintaining a steady supply of cycle stock. While this seems like an easier choice, industry experts believe that relying less on safety stock is critical to free up cash and reduce imminent customer service risks.
Let us understand what cycle stock is and what it means for inventory planning and management.
Cycle stock explained
According to business dictionary online, Cycle stock is defined as the inventory that you plan to sell based on demand forecasts. It is the amount of inventory that is projected to be used during any given period. In simple words, it is the inventory needed to meet the regular customer demand in a given period of time. The period is often defined as the time between orders (for raw materials), or the time between production cycles (for work in process and finished goods).
Challenges in maintaining inventory
Industry experts understand that inventory management is usually a rather complex task that involves collaboration between multiple parties including SKUs, suppliers, producers and any such stakeholders involved. As observed by a senior consultant at Trindent consulting during one of the engagements at a major U.S. medical device management company, inventory management was usually driven by factors which were beyond the control of planning or purchasing departments. It is therefore essential to understand the factors that can help to plan and purchase the inventory with better accuracy.
Planning for inventory accuracy
The first important factor in planning for inventory accuracy is to collaborate with all the parties involved in the production, sales and distribution process. Take variables like demographics, seasonality, annual sales and discounts, the cost per unit, storage costs, supplier availability and any such historic figures that may be relevant to the stock planning and purchase process. Getting to know all these factors is half the battle won in terms of being able to make accurate predictions about the forthcoming demand.
The next step is the use an accurate measurement to plan the cycle stock. This can either be done by using the cycle stock calculation formula, or simply through a reliable inventory management software. Accurate planning will reduce dependence on safety stock and hence ensure an increased cash flow and better risk management figures for the business.
Deciding how much inventory to carry is by no means a simple task; however, a more collaborative planning process along with more accurate estimations is the first stop towards improvement and will result in sustainable benefits.
How To Drive Behavioral Change In An Organization
Behaviors can be classified into two groups: productive and unproductive, and they can respectively either increase or decrease performance within an organization. Furthermore, behaviors allow us to have insights into personal values and beliefs, culture, and individual performance. Behaviors can be changed if willed, and the Antecedent-Behaviour-Consequence (ABC) model is a tool that can help identify some of the causes for those behaviours as well as the impact those behaviours result in by establishing a pattern.
Antecedent
Antecedents can be anything to prompt the resultant behavior. In the business world, examples of antecedents include job descriptions, training modules, KPIs, and performance coaching to name a few. To obtain a positive result, one may modify the antecedents in a scenario to drive certain behaviours. For instance, if an organization is looking for more of their sales team to achieve a certain conversion percentage to be eligible for a promotion, they may look at decreasing the conversion percentage to obtain their desired result.
Behavior
There are limits to the impact that training, processes, and procedures can influence one’s actions. What one says or does helps recognize a behavior. In other words, muscle movement is required for an action to be considered a behavior. One’s behavior can be influenced by either the antecedent or, more commonly, the consequence.
Consequence
It is important to recognize that there can be both positive and negative consequences. The outcome of events following a behavior help shape a person’s decision-making skills. Examples of positive consequences can include positive feedback, performance bonuses, and a converted sale. A positive consequence will likely lead to the repeatability of that behavior. A few instances of negative consequences can include a client hanging up, unconstructive feedback, and being ignored. In such cases, negative consequences will likely cease the continual engagement of the preceding behavior.
Prompting the right behavior by manipulating the antecedent or having an appropriate consequence for the behavior to either encourage or deter the behavior from occurring again can help shape positive behaviors. To recognize which course of action is best, it is important to first analyze whether effective performance evaluation and performance coaching has occurred.
Performance Evaluation and Coaching
Performance evaluation is a lagging indicator and has several objectives including retention, career progression, motivation, and competency development. Typically Performance evaluation occurs at a set frequency (i.e., 90-day, annual, etc.) and as a result, the consequences may be delayed. To help employees quickly improve their performance, performance coaching occurs at a higher frequency. Objectives of performance coaching include identifying performance obstacles, rapid skill development, and shaping desired behavior through appropriate reinforcement. Performance coaching has immediate and positive consequences if executed well. By incorporating all these elements, an organization can empower its employees so that they are the best version of themselves for years to come.
The author of this blog Glothen Sirisegaram is a Consultant at Trindent Consulting.