Is working with consultants a pleasure or a pain? How you find the process will depend not just on the approach taken by the consultants but also on the skill, time and effort that you invest in managing and controlling the relationship. You do not need to have your fingers burnt.

There are simple guidelines that can help achieve a process that is, as far as possible, pain-free. Some of the points may seem like common sense. But they are often ignored, and when that happens it is easy even for experienced clients to make expensive mistakes.

A point to note: the term ‘consultant’ does not mean someone supplied by an agency to do routine work or fill an empty seat. A consultant in this context is a person or firm that you call in to assist you because their professional expertise and independent viewpoint can add value to your organisation and help you meet business objectives – more a team partner than a hired hand. Whatever your reason for using consultants, you will need to make sure you obtain good value from them.

Finding a good consultant

The best guide is experience – either your own or that of people in your personal and business network whose judgement you trust. Look for appropriate technical credentials, but what really counts are the benefits the consultant has achieved for clients; his or her understanding of your operating environment; and the capacity to match your requirements with value for money.

Taking up references

Unless you are dealing with consultants who have been reliably recommended to you, ask for the names of firms they have worked with or managers who have been responsible for employing them. Follow up references by phone at the start, so you do not waste time dealing with consultants who are prone to disappoint their clients. The key points to determine are whether their delivery lived up to their promises, and would the client use them again?

Preparing the ground

Before you meet consultants – preferably on their home ground – you need to have formed a clear idea of what you want them to do and why. Consultants are expensive beasts to have around simply for reassurance. Prepare a business case, setting out your objectives and priorities, the scope of the work, the outcomes you expect, your budget and timescale, and how you see the results of the consultants’ work being translated into action. Thinking your requirements through now will pay dividends later. Identify those aspects of the work that experience tells you could go wrong, and consider how you can reduce the risk of the work not yielding its intended benefits.

Interviewing consultants

If they are sensible, consultants should be listening to what you have to say rather than telling you how good they are. Do they show an insight into the issues that matter for your business? Are they pointing out things you had not thought of, and are they prepared to say: ‘We don’t know the answer to that, but we’ll find out’? You are more likely to take to them as people if they show a down-to-earth, common sense attitude.

Weigh up the way they describe their specialist experience. Do they really know their stuff or are they just mouthing buzzwords? Are they pushing a specific product or solution? When it comes to practicalities, can they match your timescale and say who exactly would be dealing with your work?

Do not hesitate to question them about fees – consultants should always be ready to give you an honest answer. How do they normally charge for their services, and what are their average costs for the type of work you require? What information do they need from you to price the work reliably?

Other points to check are what they offer in terms of support after delivery; whether they are working for anyone who might be a business competitor; and whether they have any necessary professional indemnity cover in place.

It may be clear from these meetings that there is one firm that matches your requirements better than any other. Before you write confirming that you intend to use their services, make sure you have specified clearly the work you want done and that the consultants have quoted you a firm price. If you do not get those points right, you are inviting trouble later on.

Going to tender

If you need more information before making a choice, you can ask each consultant to put in a competitive bid. Going out to tender will cost money and effort, and it has to be justified by the criticality of the business risk if you make the wrong choice of consultant. It can also be expensive for consultants, who will need to be convinced that the potential fees make putting in a bid worthwhile. But competitive tenders do bring a range of benefits, including access to different approaches and solutions, and a chance to judge the consultants’ professionalism.

Tell consultants what information you need to see in the bid, and how you want it set out. If you do not, you will be faced with an ‘apples and oranges’ situation: each proposal will answer your request for information differently and you will find it hard to make useful comparisons.

Do not expect the bid to present a solution to your problem -– that would amount to free advice. What a proposal is meant to do is convince you that the consultant has the skills, resources and experience to work out the right solution, and is the best person to help achieve your objectives.

Identifying added value

You will want to see a clear perception of your requirements, a sensible and cost-effective work plan, sound evidence of professionalism, and a realistic and affordable price. In short, good value for money. But the best bid is likely to have an extra dimension – a distinctive added value that sets it above the rest. Added value may derive from any number of factors:

* the capacity to create revenue or secure efficiency savings

* delivering more at no extra cost

* people, processes and methodologies not available through other bidders

* good ideas that no one else has offered

* challenging, pace-setting innovation

* evidence that the consultants will put in an extra effort and go just that bit further to ensure a satisfactory result.

Bringing staff onside

If you have an in-house IT department, bring them on board by presenting the consultancy as a team effort in which their participation is important. Consultants cannot deliver in an environment where their presence is resented, and you do not want your staff to think you are losing confidence in them.

Expecting problems

Unless the job is small, short and straightforward, there will always be things that do not work out as expected and could have been done sooner or better. In the real world, the client-consultant relationship is never a smooth, trouble-free ride. When things go wrong, there is seldom just a single cause. This is why you may receive different answers from different people when you try to get to the root of the problem.

Hazards that can derail a project

Misunderstandings are a frequent cause of trouble. Consultants may fail to interpret your requirements correctly, while you may have misplaced expectations about what they can achieve. You may be unprepared to react effectively to new ideas or changes in the context of the work. Consultants may want to import a solution or model that is part of their toolkit but does not fulfil your needs. People and management systems may perform inadequately, while work can be disrupted by tensions between the consultants and your staff or within the consultant team itself.

Collaboration

The relationship between you and the consultants is a commercial one, but it should not feel as if it is fuelled solely by bank transactions. Treat consultancy as a collaborative process, seeing consultants as part of your team and viewing the costs of their professional judgement as a business investment.

These guidelines will not guarantee that your consultants will always produce a successful outcome. But following best practice will ensure you are doing the best you can to obtain good value, maximising the benefits offered by their work while minimising the risks attached to its performance.

Harold Lewis has more than 30 years’ professional experience as a specialist proposals and tendering consultant. He is the author of Choosing and Using Consultants & Advisers, and Bids, Tenders & Proposals, published by Kogan Page.