Management consultants must become trusted advisors to senior IT and non-IT client executives to help them address critical client business problems and get their buy-in on how to address these issues and opportunities in a way that ensures business value generation. This requires not merely the initiation and development of sustainable contractual relationships, but the establishment of trusted and valued relationships that enrich the client’s perceptions of the consultant’s value as well as the nature of their own business and potential for transformation.
This course will concentrate on developing the participants’ competency in engaging with clients throughout the pre-sales, business development and delivery processes in ways that help the participant understand the essentials of client engagement, building a contractual relationship, sourcing the right resources to address the client’s key business issues and to build out the firm’s ‘footprint’ (its presence at the client) in a way that the client values the relationship with the consultant and wants more services.
Course Topics include:
- Enhance the participant’s ability to perform successfully as a consultant
- Increase the participant’s ability to form strategic relationships with clients and become a trusted partner
- Delineate the contracting mechanisms and legal relationships between clients and consultants from both sides
- Explore the social, cultural, ethical and legal considerations of working in a single and multi-vendor client environment
- Establish a firm understanding of the various skills necessary for success in consulting such as influence, conflict management, expectation management, and general communications
- Look at the pragmatic aspects of consulting such as building a consulting firm and administering the consulting organization
