Understanding And Accelerating The Consultant’s Discovery Phase
The first step of the consulting process is the discovery phase, a process that involves gathering data from multiple sources before the consultants apply their expertise to solve a business problem.
The discovery phase of a consulting engagement sets the standard for everything to follow – so it’s critical to get it right!
But in a resource-constrained environment, speed and quality are essential to successful client discovery.
Related: See how 9Lenses helps consulting firms systemize sales discovery
The Consultant’s Standard Discovery Process
Many consultants rely on their own proprietary business frameworks as a value-add for their offerings. Each firm has its own unique way to approach a problem. No matter what type of framework a consultant ends up adopting, he/she needs to get to the root cause of the business problem he/she has identified. Data discovery thus enters the picture.
Consulting data discovery has evolved considerably with the advent of new technologies and increasingly sophisticated understanding of consulting. Whereas consultants previously relied on generalized ideas for interviews, client feedback, and general monitoring, many now incorporate big data analytics and predictive models into their discovery process. Even with the evolution of new technologies and more sophisticated approaches to data discovery, consultant discovery techniques typically fall under the following categories:
- Review of existing business documents and processes
- Quantitative analysis of information using statistical tools
- First-hand observations through informal stakeholder interviews
- Formal and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, including clients
- Regardless of the sophistication of the discovery process, the end result of most discovery is a plethora of spreadsheets, raw data, and subjective measurement of perceptions.
Length of the current discovery activities
Consultants spend a considerable amount of time on discovery. Once the scope of an engagement is defined, a consultant has to collect the right data to understand exactly what needs to be done. This data collection could be simple fact finding, or it could be a more involved process. Engagements vary in the time and resources committed to data collection based on the nature of the engagement, the type of discovery required, the availability of discovery tools, the type of entity being examined, and many other variables. For business consulting, it can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to several months to complete discovery for an engagement.
For any type of consulting discovery process, the discovery is rarely exhaustive. There is always more data to explore, another stakeholder to question, or other strategies to consider. The question for most consultants, therefore, is:“what can we discover in a reasonable timeframe?”
How to determine whether the discovery process has succeeded
Conducting discovery does not itself guarantee that a consultant will uncover meaningful insights. Before discovery even begins, consultants need to have a sound framework for approaching discovery. Regardless of how consultants choose to conduct discovery, there are four universal questions they must address:
Are we asking the right questions?
Assumptions debilitate effective consulting. Too often, the gap between planning and execution is a result of faulty assumptions about the nature of a problem.
Particularly when large business problems are concerned, many people will have strong opinions about the issue. Unless the right questions are asked, however, there is no way to understand the root cause of any business problem – but you don’t want to have valuable meetings become sales fishing expeditions where you’re trying to find the right things.
Do we have the right information to answer what we need to know?
This question, while obvious, is still important. In an ideal world, a consultant understands exactly what the client needs to discover and why the client needs that information. The reality is often more difficult. Business is often uncertain, processes are not as well defined as they might seem, and execution is frequently difficult to track. The key here is to understand what the goals are before starting to gather the information. The more specific those goals are, the better chance consultants have to successfully gather the correct information.
Can we reasonably say we have an accurate snapshot of business realities with the data we have collected?
Again, discovery is about understanding how much information is enough. While it might be reassuring to think consultants can gain an exhaustive understanding of the collective information available about a business problem, such an expectation is practically untenable. Consultants have to operate with limited data. Something will always be missing, but the critical test for effective discovery is whether the information is sufficient enough to determine the root cause of a problem.
Do you have enough information to reconcile disparate perspectives?
It is fairly easy to determine root cause when all the data points in the same direction, but that rarely happens. Most of the time, consultants have to wade through competing ideas and conflicting information before they can come to any accurate conclusions. An effective discovery processes will ensure that consultants have a sound method for determining which perspective is correct, or better yet, what explains the differences in perceptions.
Where Discovery Can Decrease Value You Bring
Opportunity Cost. Given the rigorous nature and high risk of many consulting engagements, discovery is not a cheap process. Fortunately, by the time businesses engage consultants for assistance, they are more focused on the quality of the services rendered, and thus they tend to be less price sensitive. There are significant pressures for consultants to consider, however.
Workforce Constraints. Working long hours is a basic expectation for any consultant. But there is a high opportunity cost associated with spending considerable time on discovery for a single engagement. As for any high-touch effort, there are many other key business activities that must be prioritized lower in order to complete discovery for an engagement. There’s only so much an army of consultants can do in a given timeframe.
Expertise. More importantly, opportunity costs for consultants become critical when considering the type of engagements consultants conduct. Not only are workforce constraints an issue, but often it is a matter of fitting the right people to right areas of expertise. If there are only a select number of experts who are best suited for a specific type of engagement, the consulting firm is substantially constrained in the volume of deals it can conduct. Efficiency certainly helps alleviate this problem, but until methods of discovery change substantially, there will always be an expertise bottleneck.
Credibility. Consultants have to balance speed with quality, which becomes increasingly difficult with constrained resources. Often, successful discovery is shortchanged because the consultant simply needs to meet a deadline. Other times, rigorous discovery is simply far more intensive than initially anticipated. Regardless, discovery can suffer when there is a deadline to meet. “Good results” become “good enough,” and quality tends to suffer.
A Decreasing Willingness to Foot the Bill
Most consulting practices would simply pass these resource costs onto clients as higher-priced services. But as many mid-to-low market consulting services discover that during harsher economic climates, prospective clients are becoming increasingly less willing to accept these costs. This is not a short-term trend, nor is it only affecting smaller consultancies. For instance, major strategy consultants are now involved in only an average of 20% of strategy development and planning, whereas 30 years ago, they were involved in as much as 70% of the process.
Shifts in the industry and reshuffling of major consultancies has made prospective clients even more reluctant to take on new engagements with high cost.
Consequently, consultants have been facing growing pressure to reduce costs and accelerate engagement timelines. Despite technological innovations that consultants have increasingly adopted to improve their discovery, basic discovery, data cleansing, and analysis techniques have remained the same. Most innovations have focused on increasing the value-add of the organization, not necessarily on the speed at which consultants gather insight.
When discovery still relies on manual processes such as gathering spreadsheets, in-person stakeholder interviews, and individual consulting knowledge, it becomes quite difficult to scale in a cost-effective manner.
Consultants Should Accelerate the Discovery Process
There’s multiple reasons why, but the main two are increased margin and volume:
Increase margin. With accelerated discovery, resource constraints are reduced. This not only frees up resources within the firm, but also means that every engagement has an increased margin. Instead of using manual processes to collect, track, and store data, consultants can use use technology to gather more useful information (a value-add in itself) while freeing up more resources.
Increase volume. If resources are less constrained, there is more bandwidth to pursue more engagements. Thus, while benefits might not be apparent initially, consultants will be able to more effectively pursue additional opportunities without being concerned about bottlenecks.
How to Accelerate the Discovery Process
Improving discovery requires a process that delivers results quickly without compromising the quality of the insights gained from discovery. Any improvements, therefore, must intentionally focus on how to accelerate existing techniques without necessarily following the exact same procedures to implement them. Three helpful principles to keep in mind:
Scale the collection process. Accelerating discovery requires implementation of effective means of scaling existing infrastructure. Technology-enabled solutions are excellent ways to automate previously manual processes. The mantra of automation has overtaken the tech world, and consultants have begun using software to great avail. The key for any consultant is to think of what needs to be scaled in the discovery process and why. As many business leaders are discovering with big data, scaled discovery is not beneficial if it means more noise and less insight. But scaling to gain more meaningful data dramatically improves the quality of discovery.
Employ flexible technology. When using technology-enabled solutions, consultants need information that can capture robust data. Since most consultants have their own defined methodologies and frameworks, they need something that can easily translate their conceptual frameworks into useful data without relying on back-end manipulation. Consultants need a way to integrate information into their framework. That way, consultants can easily feed data into their own methodologies without requiring additional work to reconcile what they have with what they need.
Make it easy to compare data. Since a consultant’s discovery process is about gaining insight from data, it is important to ensure that any technology-enabled solution increases the ease of comparing data. Translating data into a common framework largely services consultants’ needs for individual engagements, but firms also need to manage knowledge across multiple engagements. Consultants could add considerable value to their discovery process if they employed technology that used benchmarkable information across other engagements. Not only would benchmarkable data provide a credible baseline to begin discovery, but it would also provide a reasonable model for how to leverage past insights.
Resource constraints and more demanding client expectations are placing strain on the traditional methods of client discovery in the consulting process. Consultants would do well, therefore, to employ technology to accelerate client discovery.
