Consultancies are seen to be at the cutting edge of technology which is one of the reasons organisations seek their guidance. What is it that enables these organisations to be at the bleeding edge and what are they doing to stay so far ahead of their client base?
Consultancies expect their staff to keep up their skills and continually expand their knowledge to ensure they are ‘T’ shaped, with deep expertise in one area and a strong breadth across technology. How is this time funded though and who pays for that?
Formal training courses where staff leave their projects for a period of time to develop new skills are becoming more scarce with companies favouring micro-learning, where consultants learn key information on short courses they are expected to complete while chargeable to clients. Instead of profits being reinvested into the consultancy to boost skills, clients are directly funding the skills boost as consultancies follow their own mantra of 70/20/10, where 70% of learning should be on the job. With that in mind, you are not only paying for the work to be done, but to upskill a consultancy to enable them to win their next piece of work.
Consultancies must get value for money from training their staff and will seek to repeat solutions wherever possible and this directly impacts innovation. If your project is the first project of its type a consultancy has worked on, then the consultancy is bringing little value in terms of the people as they rely on your project to upskill their staff. If the consultancy has done several of these projects before, you’ll benefit from the improved delivery speed but any advancements and innovations will be limited to what the consultancy has done before.
There is an alternative model which allows you to innovate freely and retain the knowledge within your organisation. This is where Forwd comes in. We work with you to boost your own team so that you are able to innovate, differentiating yourself from your competitors rather than copying them. We help you to deliver innovation internally, with your own staff or can work with trusted recruitment firms to deliver the teams you need.
At Forwd, we have a simple commercial model where we charge a small fixed fee and then 2% of projected cost savings in year 1 and 1% of projected cost savings in year 2, with nothing further to pay for a team that is right for your organisation.
We look forwd to working with you.
