Effective engagement

Consultants have to deliver their expertise into a client organisation from outside the structure. Without effective engagement with the client, the message is lost and time wasted in frustrating politics. Consulting engagements can be highly complex with multiple work streams involving teams of both consultants and client staff. Good management is vital for both sides. The client is usually paying a lot of money to achieve a real change in the organisation. They have every right to expect that the consultant will steward their resources well and provide the right outcome, on time and within budget. The consultant equally needs an effective engagement. They need to make a profit and enhance their reputation to build brand and grow the business through follow-on work. Good engagement management is a ‘must have’ on every project.

This course is aimed at consultants who are good operationally and now seek to grow their role into leading and managing engagements. They will have participated in several successful large engagements. Participants may well have run a project on their own. The time is now right to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to move up to managing significant projects, to understand the role and risks, and deal with them in their stride. If too much time is being taken up by engagement management problems, this course is for you.

By the end of this course, you will:

• have a clear understanding of the different types of consultant intervention and what that means for engagement management
• understand the engagement lifecycle, the roles, inputs and outputs required at each stage.
• be able to identify key risks, how to communicate and manage them
• understand the importance of project and programme management
• select and implement a project management strategy
• have an understanding of a range of project management approaches, tools and techniques
• have applied the tools and techniques in a realistic case environment
• have applied some of the tools and techniques to a specific engagement in their own life (either new or recent past)

• Read the case material provided
• Prepare summary of a current engagement
• Review material on consulting interventions
• Prepare response to questions on consulting intervention
• The Engagement Management Framework
• Types of consulting and when to use them
• Stakeholder management
• Setting objectives, benefits and measures
• Team work for consultants and client staff
• Governance and reporting
• Risk identification and management
• Programme and project management – introduction
• Project strategy
• Planning and control
• Quality assurance
• Project tools and techniques
• Infrastructure to support a project
• Issue management
• The difficult client
• Hand-over of an engagement and realisation of benefits
• Feedback and coaching sessions
• Meeting agreed objectives
• Self assessment
• Monitoring results against expectations

The course is delivered on an in-house basis only.

For those that are interested, when approved, this course is intended to provide 6 credits at level 7 towards a Diploma in Professional Consulting.