TABLE OF CONTENTS Internal and external consultants both can add value The trick is knowing how to get both at the same time
Imagine that the vice president of your company has contacted you about providing your internal consultant skills to help develop and implement a complete change to the maintenance work process in one of the plants within your company. This is a major undertaking. Furthermore, the company does not have all of the internal resources necessary to staff the effort nor the desired level of experience in the area of change management. As a result, you determine that external consulting support is needed. This is not a bad solution and is one that is employed by companies every day. However, it does add one additional element to the process redesign equation that of balancing the work of external consultants with that of the internal work team. This task can be successfully accomplished, but great care needs to be taken along the way to assure that it contributes to the success of the effort.
In this example, suppose that the external consultants were selected by your company's president based on a long-term personal relationship between the president and the consultant company's owner. When they arrived on site, they made it clear to you and the work team that it was their responsibility to deliver a successful change initiative. Based on this statement, they took over the entire effort; they sought very little if any input from the internal resources that...
