Introduction
The grumbling about crappy consultants is legit, as long as you’ve fulfilled your role as co-leader with every contractual relationship.
No one enjoys crappy relationships and end products, with a consultant or otherwise. But often there was no due diligence to recruit and vet, sometimes red flags were ignored, and many times the executive leader did not fully embrace their role as a co-leader in the contracted project.
Like dating a crappy person, it is important to a.) acknowledge the mistakes that you made by not implementing best practices with an RFP and so forth, b.) make adjustments to organizational structures and practices to manage future consulting relationships, and c.) move forward.
This week’s 2 Tips supports you in adjusting your current approach to partnering with consultants and provides four helpful resources.
Tip 1
Establish structures and procedures for recruiting and vetting potential consultants. The structures and procedures will support your success even when your attention is pulled to other priorities.
Tip 2
Fully embrace your role as a co-leader in every contractual relationship, arriving prepared to meetings with the consultant as well as on time and with no distractions during the meeting. Your level of attentiveness reflects your level of leadership.
Resources to Support You in Finding & Maintaining Quality Consultants
1 | Make sure that you use an RFP process.
Whole Whale has easy to implement tools for building RFPs.
2 | Interview the consultant or consulting team, don’t only rely on the FRP responses. During the interview, ask the consultant to describe and explain the work samples that they provided in their RFP response.
The U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs has a (very) comprehensive index of interview questions that you can sample from.
3 | Use a rubric to assess work samples. Even if the topic area of the project is not your specialization, a rubric will assist you in assessing the work samples and evaluating all work applicants fairly.
There are several different ways to make the scoring rubric; after you develop the criteria listed in the RFP, move the criteria into any of these rubric layouts from Georgia State University.
4 | Contracts should include core clauses. But here we emphasize the importance of the contracts including the intended project outcomes, indicators, and timing for delivering on those indicators. While timelines change, there should be early, midway, and closing deliverables. Enter your email address below to download the sample contract.
Consulting Contract Sample
Enter your email below to download the consulting contract sample that Anchoring Success uses. Glean from it what benefits your organization.
Why did we develop 2 Tips videos?
We know that many professionals and organizational leaders do not have the funds to partner with specialists (like us) and/or the time to strategize on what might seem like extra projects.
We launched these 2 Tips videos to support you with making tweaks, adjustments, and refinements in programs and operations — doable for busy professionals like you!
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