Good Consultants are “Sensitive”

April 26th, 2007 at 07:19am David Bush - Iasta

Last November, I blogged a Supply Chain Consultants Who’s Who where I listed the top Supply Chain Consultancies out in the market according to World Trade as well as a number of smaller firms our clients have dealt with that have delivered excellent value. However, I did not provide a methodology that you could use to identify the best consulting organization for your company.

Now, AMR has recently published A Basic Consulting Skills Checklist: Does Your Implementation Team Have It? which noted that there is a common set of soft skills required that becomes more critical as the individual moves from technical back-room work to deal more with business owners and end users: project governance skills and methodologies, a variety of subtle behavioral and communications techniques, and cultural sensitivity as well as an ability to resist Consulting Stockholm Syndrome.

Their list of soft skills was particularly useful. The soft skills they listed were:

• Deep Digging
  An innate need to get to the root cause of a problem in order to suggest the best solution.
• Responsiveness
  A tendency to provide updates in a timely manner.
• Escalation Capability
  Knowing when help is needed and seeking it out at appropriate times.
• Scope Adherence
  An understanding of the big issue combined with the ability to stick to the plan or get approval when needed.
• Realism
  Promising only the possible.
• Upfrontedness
  Knowing that sometimes “bad news is better than no news” and that accurate status updates are as important as timely ones.
• Community Building
  The goal of self-enabling the organization as quickly as possible.

Furthermore, they know that their job is first to assist in business and process improvement and, through this, gain the respect of the users rather than be well liked by the masses and that change is hard, and long-term end users will resist new processes and systems and that they will have to act with care and understanding.

Funny thing is…these are the same qualities that make a good and productive employee in sourcing or any industry.

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Entry Filed under: Analysts/Research, General