Was It Something I Said?
Consultant-Client Relationships
By Vijay Mehrotra
Earlier this summer, my good friend Tom Grossman faxed me an article entitled "Wearing Your Client's Shoes," by Jonathon Flowers (OR Insight, Vol. 13, Issue 3, June 2000). This month's column is an unabashed promotion for Flowers' paper.
Paragraph 3 stopped me dead in my tracks: "Most OR people have never been clients, so can find it hard to empathize with them."
A natural consequence of the increasingly common progression from classroom student to scientific researcher to operations management consultant: We see the world through a consultant's eyes, where every company that we engage with is just a place that we visit. The people in these organizations exist to function as our clients.
And more often than not, we are irritated by their inability to do what it takes to be "Great Clients" (see "Was It Something I Said?" OR/MS Today, December 2000).
Month after month I write about how we need to think more about the client's knotty business problems than our own elegant mathematics. Fine — those of you that are still bothering to read my column no doubt "get" this by now. But in reading Flowers' paper, I realized that there are more much basic elements in the dynamics of the consultant-client relationships.
Flowers starts by talking about a client's day-to-day life, and it ain't too pretty: intense, dreary days stuffed with brief face-to-face interactions, unending streams of e-mail, meeting after meeting, and nearly everyone coming at you with their own maniacal sense of immediacy.
The manager who contemplates bringing in outside help to cope with some aspect of this chaotic experience is not the profit-maximizing decision-maker that we assume in our models. Rather, Flowers points out, this person is a frazzled, pressured, suspicious, worried human being who is taking a risk in spending resources (staff time and focus can be just as costly as consulting fees) on something that they really do not understand too well.
However, we consultants often do little to help them overcome these feelings. Part of it is training, for we usually have little academic exposure to these "squishier" aspects of decision-making or first-hand experience in wrestling with such situations and feelings. But it is also how we approach these situations, talking more about technology and methods than about tangible business results. And I'm just as bad as anyone is in this regard.
Once we have acquired the client and begun working with them, we continue to exhibit these tendencies. Our status reports are usually descriptions of technical progress and project-centric achievements. In contrast, Flowers describes a list of "bluebottle" questions about primary things that clients worry about:
- Do the consultants really understand the problem? If so, are they looking in the right direction for solutions? If not, how much time and money will they waste before they/I realize it?
- Is the project on track, in terms of time, budget and objectives?
- Are the consultants interacting effectively with the rest of the organization? If not, will I lose credibility as a result?
- Will I be able to understand, use and communicate what they have done? What is the likely payback, and what else will I need to do to achieve it?
Finally, Flowers makes a critical point about finishing projects in order to have a real impact: you as a consultant know more about it than your client. You have more experience about how to get your work to take root in the client organization.
As such, you must provide guidance to the client about what else is needed, be it data cleansing, new job descriptions, executive promotions or whatever else. The client does often not seek this advice — for reasons that are discussed in the article — and as such there is a temptation to believe that it is not our place to provide it. Flowers strongly encourages us NOT to fall for that easy out. Why do I so heartily endorse Flowers' view of the world? First of all, because he's been out there. In addition to graduate training in operations research and in business, in addition to years of consulting, he has also been a line manager for more than five years. He's Sherman Potter to my Hawkeye Pierce.
In addition, because his prose drips with both humor and veracity about the frustrations of today's corporate managers. To wit: "Reading any document longer than a couple of pages probably happens on the train home (or in the loo) and that strategic thinking probably happens in bed, in the dark, between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m."
Finally, because he is an optimist. I came away from his article with the sense that despite all of the obstacles, there is yet much hope for us to influence managers to dare to take chances on innovative projects that involve quantitative techniques. ("Before you get too depressed," he writes in the middle of it all, "let me assure you that it's easily the most fun I've ever had that I got paid for.")
Frankly, I wish I knew more people like him, people who see the many sides of the relationship between consultants and clients (and between OR and business) and cheerfully dig in to try to make things happen.
Vijay Mehrotra (vijay@onward-net.com) is the CEO of Onward, Inc. in Mountain View, Calif.
OR/MS Today copyright © 2001 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
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