When a client hires a consultant, a lot of issues are laid on the table and a lot of promises are made between the client manager and the consultant business developer.
By the time a consultant engages the client to produce a solution, it can be overwhelming to assess the situation, manage the client's expectations, and provide a solution.
Hypothesis-based consulting provides a logic-model to complete a consulting life cycle efficiently.
As a consultant, first, inspect the Statement of Work (SOW) and Contract Deliverables (CDRLs) to verify what is contractly expected.
Then interview the client to discover their objective for hiring a consultant. The responses might be narrow (train my staff) or broad (increase my revenues), but will always be incomplete and ambiguous.
Using the above as our "scope" (boundary of work effort), we can employ the following lean six sigma tools:
- affinity diagram (document all of the complaints associated with the topic and group them into logical categories to aggragate the responses)
- pareto analysis (discovers which problem has the largest impact)
- root cause analysis (a fishbone shows 'why' a problem exists)
At this point, the consultant has a finite, solvable problem that can be managed and delivered in an efficient and profitable manner (we didn't have to boil the ocean). Using the tools above, the solution is sure to have the proper stakeholder buy-in and provide the 'biggest bang for the buck' to the customer.
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