What’s in your consulting toolbox?
If you are a consultant working for a consulting organisation helping businesses to improve their performance, productivity and profitability, you probably have various tools, templates and methodologies to help deliver your services.
Typically consultants will use established tools such as spreadsheets, documents, presentations and sometimes databases, which have been configured into templates, guides and processes. These tools are common because they are widely available, are used by majority of businesses and are very flexible to configure and set up.
Although these points are beneficial, how do you differentiate yourself against the competition?
Hybrid working will change how you consult
Before COVID 19 you probably would have arrived at the clients office, met with various people, completed workshops and held interviews.
I know when I was consulting it involved a lot of travelling, anywhere 1 to 3 flights a week, visiting different sites and physically meeting people.
Now with hybrid working people are not always going to be all in one place and secondly, climate change and looking after the environment means that travelling is reduced and so consulting cannot continue as before.
The challenge for you as a consultant is to try and adapt to this hybrid way of working whilst using the same tools to complete your consulting assignments. This is not going to work.
A new tool set is required to support your existing tools to ensure you are working effectively and efficiently, that you remain competitive, consistently and successfully deliver the agreed benefits/outcomes and create value for your clients.
Visual Collaboration Solutions
As a consultant you will have gained specific expertise and experience, coupled with behaviours and skills that enable you to successfully work and collaborate with colleagues and clients. This type of physical collaboration is still an important part of the engagement, if not more now that some people you meet with will be working remotely.
However, this is where the change needs to happen. In addition to your physical collaboration you need to integrate data and digital collaboration. By combining these three types of collaborations you will create a Visual Collaboration “platform”.
Improvement with regards to your data and digital collaborations may not have been important or even not a requirement to deliver the project successfully. Now its a necessity.
Integrated Collaborations
- 𝐏𝐡𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: Creating collaborative business relationships by committed organisations to maximise joint performance for achievement of mutual objectives and creation of additional value
- 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐂𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: Visualizing data from all of your different data sources, and getting this data to the right people, in the right format, in time to uncover insights and make informed decisions.
- 𝐃𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: Digital collaboration is using digital technologies for collaboration. Different from “traditional collaboration”, it connects a broader network of people who can accomplish much more than they would on their own.
- 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: Aligning and integrating your physical, data and digital collaborations you will have co-created your business visual collaboration solution that will enable you to collaborate with other people and organisations, share and visualise data and work remotely in highly productive way.
By integrating the first three collaborations to produce your visual collaboration platform, it can help you to engage with people both inside and outside your organisation. By taking your typically paper based or non collaborative tools, systems and processes, you create a visual, data driven and collaborative way of working to facilitate enhanced hybrid business collaboration.
Visual Collaboration Solutions (R-VCS) for Consultants
Consultants have so many templates, tools and some that have not even been developed yet. That is why spreadsheets, presentations and email are used so much.
- Spreadsheets to collate and analyse the data and information
- Presentations to communicate the analysis and findings
- Email to share and connect
This is a common process, that is repeated every time there is a change and update which has to be sent and shared with everyone. Yes there are more productivity tools available in products such as Microsoft Office 365, Mural, Miro, etc. There are also the clients multiple Line of Business Systems such as CRM, ERP, CMS, etc which need to be accessed or integrated to provide key data. Doing this with spreadsheets and other digital collaboration tools which are not data driven is very challenging.
R-VCS, powered by SharpCloud solves these problems.
Solution based consultancy
As a consultant you can take your existing manual, “paper based” tools, templates and processes and “digitise” them into solutions/products/apps. Using R-VCS apps as a ready to use tool or as a template to build out your own apps using SharpCloud’s low code/no code functionality.
This means you change from being standard, service based consulting practice to an innovative, leading edge, high performing and collaborative consulting organisation.
Below are some user case examples of what you could do using R-VCS, powered by SharpCloud.
Examples of R-VCS apps, powered by SharpCloud
Simply click on the buttons at the bottom of the view and a new view will be displayed. You can use the tags at the bottom to filter by industry.
Jason and myself collaborated in creating the interactive roadmap for Hybrid Electric aircraft within the FutPrInt50 project.
Jason’s experience and knowledge made us able to deliver more than was expected. His thorough understanding of creating model based interactive roadmaps challenged us take the extra step and visualize more than was initially anticipated.
I can highly recommend working with Jason, as he pushes you to higher levels.
Jason helped us shape the #futprint50 roadmap into shape. He gave us great advice and helped us navigate from the general to the implementation.
He was also dedicated and a key element to the final product. I would welcome working again with him for a similar endeavour.
