Consulting Re-imagined Series

Imagine your organisation has a backlog of digital projects and programmes in the pipeline, some to fix legacy systems which are becoming increasingly costly to maintain with ever decreasing in-house knowledge, some which are long overdue digital transformations for your business, and some which are new greenfield projects – creativity and innovation – where speed to market is essential for the competitive edge.

Imagine all these conflicting priorities and more awaiting prioritisation and approval before budget and resourcing can be released.

Imagine the cost to the business, at best stagnating while competitors move forward. Imagine senior technical employees juggling with the mountain of approval processes, let’s face it this is not just a symptom of large organisations, plenty of small companies also suffer from this.

Imagine those approvals finally reaching the overloaded CTO, who has precious little time to consider each proposal on top of their other day to day management responsibilities, their meetings with the board, talks with the strategy department, external commitments, the list goes on.

• The business case proposals become stripped of more and more details every layer of review they go through before reaching the CTO.
• The CTO, time poor, asks key questions and sends the proposal back to dig up the information requested.
• The next available slot with the CTO is not for another 3 weeks at the earliest and this is just at the business case approval stage!

Now imagine if there was a mechanism to pick up the overflow from the CTO workload in times of high traffic, for example at budget review times of year. Imagine a temporary senior technology manager can be drafted in to pick up the routine work, freeing up time for the CTO to consider the backlog of programmes requiring attention. A highly skilled, experienced senior technology professional who can assist on a temporary basis, or one day a week to clear the backlog, or perhaps at the end of each financial quarter to ensure budget forecasts don’t bring routine work to a standstill.

This is where flexible expert professionals (Flexperts) can help.

The CTO is just one example, this scenario applies across many senior roles. Flexperts can dive in and give the support required for the duration needed.

• no long consultation process
• no land and expand
• no insisting on bringing in our own team to fill all roles

Simply supporting overloaded roles to deliver the outputs and outcomes required, or picking up the more mundane tasks to free up valuable time.

"Why wouldn't we just delegate to the CTO's deputy?".
If the CTO is overloaded, you can be sure the deputy is also overloaded, and delegating to them does not address the issue.

"But they won’t have the inside knowledge of the organisation, or the contacts, or the context" I hear you cry.
Well, there is a school of thought that says the most important person in any organisation is the executive assistant, who is the gateway to critical meetings and decision making. And yet, such a crucial and powerful role is often covered by external temps. Why? Because the temp has experience, is highly skilled at the job, and is simply providing cover to tide things over.

"We don’t have budget for senior consultants" is another obstacle you hear.
Let's look at the cost/benefit and consider

• the cost of a stressed CTO
• the cost of delayed decision making
• the cost of people’s time in rescheduling approval meetings
• the cost of stagnation

In comparison, the cost of a temporary consultant to improve efficiency looks a lot more appealing and less of a loss.

If we re-imagine the working norms which hold us back, then we can remove the roadblocks and move faster towards the company’s goals, vision and outcomes.

Flexible experts are not just any consultants, they're a new breed.

Consulting re-imagined means flexibility for business and flexibility for experts.