Why Partner with Consultants?
Professional consulting services enable companies to reap the benefits of expertise external to their organizations, but how does one go about choosing the right firms? Large-scale powerhouses like the “big four” (Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst & Young, and PricewaterhouseCoopers) can offer nearly limitless resources for driving a project to success, albeit at a hefty price tag. On the other end of the spectrum, small-scale niche or boutique firms have fewer resources but typically provide more specialized, cost-effective complementary offerings. Let’s dive deeper into what you should consider when selecting the right consulting partners for your needs!
What Are Your Values?
The best consulting partnerships occur when all parties have a shared understanding of the business value they hope to achieve through their collaboration. While the specifics of delivery will vary by engagement and partner, it is critical that everyone involved align and operate on a shared vision of value.
Failure to do so will result in misused time, money, and resourcing, and it will often cause the project’s downfall if left unchecked. Knowing this, strong partnership candidates will insist on developing agreed-upon definitions of business and project value to serve as the guiding light for all project endeavors.
The Value Larger Firms Bring
It’s likely no surprise that resourcing flexibility and availability are some of the greatest assets larger consulting firms can bring to bear. What does this actually mean, though? To start with, larger resource pools enable firms to retain subject matter experts in a wide array of domains that range from the common to the downright niche (I think of this as subject matter specialization). Depending on the nature of your contract, these firms’ greater numbers can also mean more people available to make your project vision a reality.
Beyond people power and subject matter specialization, there’s what I think of as a business strategy specialization. For firms like the “big four,” this looks like retaining experienced partners and other senior leaders who often excel at collaborating with executives to define the overarching actionable plans and roadmaps to bring the business vision to life. They typically are quite strong at crafting language and content that clearly and concisely communicates and aligns stakeholders on this strategy.
Once a roadmap has been captured, these firms will then leverage their program and project management expertise to coordinate the project execution against the high-level deliverables that have been committed to. This helps ensure that things are completed on time and that progress is incrementally reportable to the executive layer. Program leads from the larger firms have a number of tools at their disposal, some examples of which include elicitation sessions to capture the roadmap, program planning templates to capture the work and timelines for high-level features derived from that elicitation, and project triaging tools like RAID logs.
Why Clients Choose ArgonDigital to Complement Their Major Consulting Partners
Where the larger consulting firms typically specialize in executive vision and project management, smaller consulting firms tend to steer more towards collaboration with the business, product management, requirements delivery, or other point services. Our clients typically bring us onto projects with the larger consulting firms to serve as utility players that focus on the product, its implementation, customer and stakeholder satisfaction, and user adoption.
Quality product management centers on using visual models to fully capture the breadth of business needs. Our teams use models to identify all relevant scenarios and business logic across complex end-to-end processes; this empowers us to build gapless solutions while also documenting and implementing the ideal user experience at every step. Sometimes, our clients lean on us to do low-code automation of those business rules as integration points for massive deployments.
One of the comments we consistently receive from our clients is that they appreciate our willingness to take the theoretical and turn it into something real. Using close collaboration with the larger firms’ executive strategies, we make our clients’ visions a reality by owning the execution and producing the deliverables that move their projects forward. This means we lead elicitation sessions to understand business needs on specific features, create the requirements models as needed, write user stories, work with development to ensure they understand the requirements, do integrations with low-code automation solutions, and lead user acceptance testing (UAT) to drive adoption.
Capitalizing on the Unique Strengths of Both Large and Small Consulting Firms
Having compared the strengths of larger vs. smaller consulting firms, you’re now probably asking yourself – How do we go about selecting the right consulting partner? In such cases, the optimal solution often involves selecting both.
While subject matter specializations can vary widely, the delivery specializations of large and small firms are uniquely complementary. Where project management is needed to ensure the team delivers exactly what they have committed to by the agreed upon dates (all while ensuring budget and scope remain on target), product management is critical to ensuring the team builds the right thing the right way. Bringing it back to value, large and small firms both support the executive vision – the former by helping to define and plan it and the latter by building a product that remains faithful to it, as well as the needs of the business.
One of the most common partnership scenarios we see involves clients who engage a larger consulting firm to design the program governance. This plays into their broader program and project management skills, as well as their specializations in executive engagement. Having established the big picture, the client then relies on a product-focused niche firm like ArgonDigital to manage the execution. This is where depth of product expertise and a specialization in product management and delivery can really shine. In these partnership scenarios, both groups elevate the unique contributions of the other.
There Is No One Right Path
Just as there are many variables that should inform your choice when selecting the right consulting partner, there are many paths you can take to achieve project success. You are the authority on what you need. Whichever path you choose, the most important thing is that you walk it with trusted partners who will put your business values first.
