8.1 Basic Internal Consulting

Imagine that you are contacted by a manger within your organization concerning a project for you to handle within your role as internal consultant. The project is very complex and involves many departments. Furthermore, it has a great deal of potential to improve your plant's competitive advantage in relationship to the other plants within your company. The project is to determine how to convert the highly-reactive maintenance organization into one that plans and schedules their work and is focused on equipment reliability vs rapid repair.

This is no small task. However, the manager is very enthusiastic and, based on input from other managers as well as from personal experience with your work, wants you to be the internal consultant on the project. The question we will answer in this chapter is how you go about the task of taking a manager's idea related to improved performance and convert it into a real, delivered work process for the organization.

There are specific steps in this process. If you have ever worked with external consultants, you will recognize this process because with minor variations it is applied by all consulting firms.

The steps of this process are:

1. The vision of the effort

2. Clarification of the assignment

3. Strategy development

4. Information gathering

5. Analysis and gap identification

6. Preparation of the recommendations

7. Presentation with defined next steps

8. Agreement locking it down

9. Execution

10. Disengagement

11. Audit

There...