Covalent Solutions Inc.®

1. Focus on the relationship: Identifying who the client is, and understanding the motivations, culture, history, fears, and goals of both the human being and the organization he or she represents, is one of the most difficult tasks in consulting. Our success in this task has much more bearing on the success or failure of our engagements than the technical discipline involved.

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2. Clearly define our role: Setting the expectation with the client regarding exactly what we are there to accomplish, what tasks we are making a commitment to perform, what tasks we expect the client to perform, and where the boundaries of the relationship lie, is a key success factor in our consulting engagements.

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3. Visualize success: It is the consultant’s central role to help the client draw a mental picture of the desired result of the engagement. Failure to do so results in the dreaded scope creep, in which the engagement never concludes because the expectations keep changing. Visualizing a successful result creates a common goal that all participants can agree upon and strive for together. Like the championship ring for a sports team, it is an unambiguous and motivational endpoint that clarifies the effort and helps clear away extraneous issues and barriers.

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4. We advise; you decide: One of the most difficult tasks for consultants is to cast aside emotional attachment to their own advice. Many tacticians fall in love with a particular, suggestion, solution or technology, and then lose interest in, or respect for, the client if they decide to take another approach. We must always remember that the client best understands the complexities of their own environment, and that they will live with the result of their decision, while we move on to the next assignment. We will provide strong advise, but the final decision and responsibility for success or failure clearly is in the hands of the client. 

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5. Be oriented toward results: Consulting is more than advising, it is assisting clients to reach a goal. While some advisory relationships are strictly informational, most clients want us to not only recommend solutions, they want us to help implement them. Politics is often described as “the art of the possible,” which is a good definition for results-oriented consulting as well. By considering implementation issues throughout the engagement, such as corporate culture, readiness to change, training requirements, and corporate communications channels, we keep our eye on the realm of possibility, avoid getting sidetracked into the theoretical, and prepare the client for the real-world issues of implementation and system operation. However, as we defined in fundamental IV--we clearly recognized the limits of our relationship!