When the Right Consultant Can Help

First, Karlyn Morrissette (she tweets as @KarlynM-and if you aren’t following her, you should be) provoked a minor Twitterstorm by asking: “Why are higher education consultants given more credibility than full-time staff who say the exact same thing?” Forty peoplepractitioners at all levels, faculty members, and consultants-weighed in. Karlyn created a mind map of the results and posted it on her blog.

Update, 30 April: Karlyn posted her own thoughts about “When to Hire a Consultant” this morning.

Then, Higher Ed Experts hosted a web redesign conversation and there was some talk about the role of consultants in the large web redesign project being discussed. I followed the discussion via the Twitter hastag (#heecamp): HEE is a closed community, and as a consultant, I can’t participate in HEE discussions.

I believe I can appreciate the multiple perspectives on these discussions. I worked as a staff member at three very different institutions (Lehigh University, Princeton, the College Board) in different roles; I’ve worked as a consultant since 1994 and consulted with about 250 organizations in that time; and mStoner has completed more institutional web redevelopment projects in education than any other consulting firm. In the early years of our practice, I led many of these projects personally; now, although I participate in some of them, I have other responsibilities at the firm. One of these involves interacting with key stakeholder groups at our client institutions around strategy, practice, and change management.

In short, my viewpoints are based on personal experience in the trenches as an insider and outsider. And they are seasoned with a dash of intergroup relations theory about how groups can scapegoat people.

I can understand why internal staff members would feel insulted, even threatened, when institutional leaders choose to hire a consultant to do a project that staff believes they can do. It’s especially problematic at institutions where leaders routinely ignore staff advice believing they somehow know better.

When the right consultant makes sense

But I also know that there are very good reasons to hire the right consultant. Here are some of them. [I’ll add others as I think of them—and you can add your own in the comments.]

1. A good consultant has done it before. Often many, many, many times. While the Internet certainly has made information widely available, information isn’t the same thing as knowledge or experience. It’s possible to exhaustively research process or products by doing a Google search and spending enough time online. But there are limitations to doing this kind of research. You often don’t know what important questions you’re not asking when you do your own research.

Case in point: I know of a campus IT team that spent hundreds of hours investigating content management systems, wrote an RFP, scheduled vendor demos, selected a CMS, paid a down-payment to the chosen vendor, and arranged a workshop for various on-campus users to unveil the product that they would all be using. The president of the company flew in; when he started his demo, his system crashed and it was downhill from there. He should have guessed that there were problems when the murmering began; finally, the director of one of the largest units on campus stood up and said, “I’ve seen enough. This isn’t going to work for us. We’ll find our own CMS.” He and his staff led an exodus from the meeting.

Can you guess what the problem was? Technically, the system seemed very sound, which is what really excited the IT team in the first place. But the UI was terrible and as soon as people who were evaluating the system for its effectiveness got a look at it, they were appalled. The director who left knew right away that none of the admin staff in his unit who were charged with updating websites would have the patience to figure out such a kludgy UI, especially when there were simple alternatives.

Our project managers have collectively managed dozens of projects. And we have developers who have implemented multiple content management systems multiple times. No campus I know of has staff with this kind of experience. Our clients benefit from our experience and it ups the odds that the project will run more smoothly.

Moral of the story: A good consultant will help you ask the questions you haven’t thought to ask and bring lots of experience to bear on your project—much more than you have internally.

2. A good consultant can help break up political logjams. As a campus communicator, I hated politics: politics gets in the way of getting things done. Just think of all those discussions that go round-and-round, with no resolution.

But politics is a fact of life on every campus. There are many times when an experienced outside voice can break through the chatter and help to move things in a different direction. Maybe it’s a different voice, with experience and perspective (those words again), who can give permission to take a different direction.

It also helps if your consultant understands education and what to say and what not to say to different audiences. I don’t believe I’m being less than authentic when I avoid the term “branding” when talking with faculty. There are other ways to get the concept across without using a term that they will immediately find objectionable.

In fairness, I’ve also seen cases where someone-whether a VP, a faculty member, or a president-just doesn’t want to be convinced, by anybody, that a change is necessary. So hiring a consultant to help change institutional leaders or cultures that are intrinsically resistant to change won’t always work.

Moral of the story: I’m not saying that it’s right that this phenonmenon occurs. But it’s the reality. So be smart and use a consultant as a catlyst to help make changes that will make a difference for your institution and for your life.

3. Staff can’t do the work. One of the reasons that people hire us-or another consultant-to do a huge project like an institutional website redesign is that they don’t have enough staff, with enough time, to accomplish what we can accomplish.

I know that people (like many university staff members) think that some big web redevelopment budgets are huge. But that’s at least partially because internal cost estimates don’t take into account the most important internal variable, staff time, and factor in how much time it takes, or how long it takes, to get a project done. If you track time accurately, you often learn that consultants can be cost-effective because they can save time.

It’s as if people think that because staff get paid a salary, there’s no cost for having them work on a project. To me, that’s patently false. I have to ask: what else could those staff people be doing? What other tasks might they have accomplished?

Typically, the biggest “expense” for a college or university-staff time-is also its scarcest resource. I’ve never met an IT team that has too little do do.

So, I put the question to you, “If you are doing a site redevelopment project, what else won’t you be doing while you’re doing that?” Can you afford for that other work not to get done?

What do you think it cost the University I mentioned above to have its IT staff choose a CMS and have its recommendation tossed out? For one thing, there were hundreds of hours involved in evaluating CMSs to begin with. You want to take a guess at about 1,500 hours conservatively? That’s 28 weeks’ worth of time or about $30,000 at $30/hour. I’ll bet there were a lot of other projects that went undone, some of which were probably important.

Moral of the story: Consultants can help you accomplish in lot, usually in less time than it would take you to do it internally. While the instititution may pay a premium, sometimes that’s the best way to get the work done quickly.