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Summer School 2008: Expanding your consulting horizons
You can pick and choose what sessions you would like to attend - and can swap between the three streams so that you can select exactly the topics that suit your needs and interests best.
Thursday July 17: morning: 9:001:00
| Welcome to the Summer School and introductions | ||
| Stream 1: Growing sales | Stream 2: Consulting skills refresh | Stream 3: Consulting labs |
| 1.1 Winning clients’ attention David Wornham |
2.1 Handling difficult people Cynthia Pexton-Shaw |
3.1 The consultant leader Calvert Markham |
| "Free Cash for Everyone"...and other ways to win and sustain your clients attention. Despite the supposed increase in leisure time, people seem busier than ever. How can you compete for attention when there are so many other items that are attractive – and time consuming? This session will review methods that have proved to be effective and enable participants to compare their experiences on this increasingly important topic. | At some point it will happen, if it hasn’t already (perhaps frequently!): you have someone in your meeting, workshop or on your project team who is ‘difficult’ and you don’t know what to do about them. This session will help participants explore why some people ARE difficult and what we can do to address this. | Career progression in consulting requires taking on more commercial and management responsibility beyond the skills of delivery. So, what are the new tasks you need to take on? What are the skills needed to perform them well? This session introduces these topics and the training needed to succeed. |
| Break and networking | ||
| 1.2 The yin and yang of selling and buying Paul Vincent | 2.2 Project success = getting the people right Philip Taylor | 3.2 Advanced presenting with PowerPoint Gill Goodwin |
| A sale is not possible without a purchase, and no purchase is possible without a sale. Selling can easily be considered only from the point of view of the seller, but good salespeople have long known that the buyer’s point of view is equally important. This session reviews some of the work that has been done of late into the purchase of consultancy. | Experience teaches us that to succeed in projects we should focus 80% on the people and only 20% on the technical solution. Factors such as client commitment, quality of the client project leader and overloading the client team are vital. In this workshop we will try out some tools, such as DICE, for assessing the chances of success and then discuss techniques for overcoming the risks when people are about to sink our projects. | The design and structure of any PowerPoint presentation is the basis for the delivery of a message - badly designed, it will result in an unprofessional presentation with an ineffective outcome. Advanced Presenting with PowerPoint addresses this issue. It is not planned as technical training on PowerPoint as consultants already have these skills, but is about content, design, delivery and practical use to make presentations more professional and effective. |
LUNCH
Thursday July 17: afternoon: 2:005:15+
| 1.3 On-selling and sales opportunity selling for consultants Anthony Rees | 2.3 Strategies for faster workload management Helen Whitten | 3.3 What’s new in problem solving? Robert Fonteijn |
| 60 – 70% of any consultancy firms’ sales are generated from existing projects in existing clients; however, many delivery consultants dislike this aspect of their jobs. This session will give delivery consultants five simple and pragmatic tools and techniques to help them increase their selling skills with existing clients and boost their careers! | The majority of people have not been given any reading skills training since they first learnt to read. Yet today people are dealing with more information than any other generation in history. This session will provide you with some practical but powerful techniques that will help you speed up information processing and identify the key points successfully. NB: delegates should bring to the session a text-book style management, leadership, study or self-help book that they have not read before. Novels are not suitable. | A fresh view and some inspiring thoughts and stories to apply to your own areas of problem solving. We will look into three aspects of dealing with problems that have been shown to be exciting – and that work. |
| Break | ||
| 1.4 Winning big bids Simon Scarrott |
2.4 Analytical tools update – more than SWOT! David Wornham | 3.4 Understand yourself and your clients Anthony Rees |
| It is well known that the cost of selling large consulting jobs is less pro rata for larger jobs, so consulting firms aim to increase the unit size of sale. But do large sales require different tools and techniques? Is there a breakpoint at which the nature of the sales process becomes profoundly different from that for smaller jobs? This session explores what skills are needed to win big bids. | “Blunt instrument or cutting edge?” Consultants use tools of all kinds for analysis, facilitation, diagnosis and representing situations. In this session we will be reviewing new applications for old friends and some of the recently popular tools that are being used in business. | Difference is not simply perversity; everybody is different and the art is to understand the significance of this and to harness it for everyone’s benefit – for clients, the practice and your own. Consulting demands close co-operation in order to achieve success and so building strong teams and utilising the strengths of all of its members largely depends on the quality of these relationships. This workshop explores some of these issues using the well known Strength Deployment Inventory tool (SDI). |
| Summary of Day 1. Conference Reception Dinner 7.30pm | ||
Friday July 18: morning: 9:00–1:00
| Tai Chi and Qi Gong Norman Savigar - Start the day with this introduction to Tai Chi and Qi Gong – for health in mind, body and spirit (Wear loose clothing) | ||
| Introduction to day 2: Review on Thursday | ||
| 1.5 Going beyond Google Terry Kendrick |
2.5 Coaching your client Ed Moffatt |
3.5 Appreciative inquiry: A fresh Approach Cynthia Pexton-Shaw |
| Much of consulting involves gathering information and there is a vast amount of it on the web. Google is superb, but covers only a fraction of what is available. Being able to access what is fully available provides advantage in both selling and delivering consultancy and this session provides an introduction into the deep web and some techniques for using it to get better quality information. | As consultants we initially engage with our clients to bring our technical expertise and problem solving to bear. However, when the client asks for our help in improving their own performance a different approach and relationship is required. In this session, the nature of the relationship, a coaching model, coaching competencies and how to help your client to be a good client are all explored. | Which motivates you more: Criticism or Appreciation? Not surprisingly, many people choose the latter. And, perhaps surprisingly, organisations are no different. Appreciative Inquiry can be defined as the art of looking for the positive in human undertakings. This session will explore how we as consultants can help our clients bring about change through a robust process of focusing on the positive. |
| Break and networking | ||
| 1.6 Getting to the real issues Philip Taylor |
2.6 Working with large groups Graham Benjamin |
3.6 Working with foreign associates Robert Fonteijn |
| The client presents symptoms; you propose a solution; but the sale is not clinched. Why? Because the client management are interested in why the work should be done, what benefits they will receive, how it fits into the context of their business. This session looks at how we can move beyond talking about what we will do and so reach the client’s real issues. The workshop will be strongly interactive, tackling real situations suggested by the participants and applying some deceptively simple questions which can change the whole tone of a sales meeting. | Large groups are variously described in the literature as “bigger than a dozen people” through to whole communities. The need to intervene with large groups or to engage with large numbers of people is ever present. This session will identify the different kinds of large group, their different needs and the options for working with them. Hopefully there will be time to relate examples of practice to the experience or needs of participants. | In global organisations, diversity is valued rather than contained. It is seen as a source rather than an impediment to competitive advantage. But this is not automatic We will focus on making sense of diversity. We will discuss some practical business challenges such as the choice of communication media, the understanding of meaning in communication and the use of planning techniques |
LUNCH
Friday July 18: afternoon: 2:00–4:15
| 1.7 Dealing with the politics - when things don’t seem to work out… Ed Moffatt |
2.7 Value mapping Peter Franklin |
3.7 Complexity thinking and its impact on consulting practice Jacky McMahon |
| “Life would be easier if it wasn’t for my clients, colleagues, boss…!”If you’re suffering from an overdose of politics, come to this session to understand them better. | To enable groups of people working on complex issues to come to a shared vision of how to best move forward by bringing them to a single view of how the world works. The vehicle for achieving this is the Value Map – a diagrammatic representation of the business or issue system they are grappling with. If Value Mapping has passed you by, attending this session is a “must” since Value Mapping is an essential tool in the kit bag of a management consultant. | Ever wondered why, however well you plan your projects, unforeseen events send you off course and cause delays and frustration all round? It may be that complexity thinking can add something to our understanding of what is really going on. We will introduce some ideas from complexity, where ideas and solutions are generated through dialogue and identify how consultants need to modify their consulting practice. This paradoxical way of working is the focus of our session. |
| Bringing it all together: translating learning into performance back at work. End of Summer School | ||
| End of summer school 2008 | ||
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What our clients say
A wonderfully interactive course with lots of practical exercises.
Veera Rasanen, Finpro
The training is practical, with lots of tools to take away
David Saint, Action Planning
We didn't expect to learn so much about the strengths and weaknesses of our consultants through the training. It was an extra spin off benefit to us..
David Watts, CCD
Elevation Learning is an approved training centre for the Chartered Management Institute and endorsed training provider for the Institute of Consulting.
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