I want to tell you a story about a time we were meeting with one of our larger clients. This story emphasizes the benefits of bringing in consultants by showing what an objective third party can do to help you identify opportunities for improvement.
The client was a large, state university with multiple campuses. We happened to be meeting with representatives from a smaller campus working to help first generation college students succeed. We were meeting to discuss the current state challenges and future state requirements of a technology selection and implementation.
Our process improves collaboration in part by facilitating conversations between isolated silos of your organization and generally creates an opportunity for process improvement. In this case, we brought together a director of academic advising and the director of IT, as well as a few others.
We were discussing the advising process and the pain points surrounding their current state. In this case, many of the pain points were related to the complexity of extracting useful data and reporting from the system. Put simply, users couldn’t get the data they needed to support their efforts without requesting development and report writing from IT.
The Advisor was talking through the process of working with students who were struggling. When they pull a report of grades near the end of a semester, it’s often too late to meet with every student with poor grades. She was interested in having the new technology automate reporting for every student who had dropped below a C letter grade in order to proactively address the issues with the student and professors.
The conversation went about like this:
As it turns out, they could build that functionality and implement it in the current system, and it would only take half an hour. During a meeting the next morning, the advisor was ecstatic about the report showing up in her inbox that morning!
In this case we were brought in as an expert, outside perspective to help identify and solve problems, but that’s just one piece of being a consultant. We always work with our clients to find valuable solutions to problems through examination of current and future states relative to organizational context. The experience we bring helps us identify where transformation can occur and helps facilitate and guide that transformation through people, process, and technology. We work with you to analyze your current state processes, the technology you have, and the desired future state, and come up with a plan and recommendations.
The impact of defining your current state processes can be great, and you’ll recognize immediate benefits. To amplify the benefits of transformation, consider business process improvement to help you craft ideal future state processes. There is immense benefit for our clients who engage in every element of our six step process, because we almost always see critical pieces of the puzzle come together in each step, and without these pieces you may be missing out on opportunities to transform.
If you’re leading an organization that has isolated silos and you’re in need of a technology change or process improvement, we’d like to help. Working with us and following our process can create transformation in a much smoother fashion than trying to do so internally.
We want to hear your stories as well! Are there times when you’ve found value through executing processes designed to do so? Tell us about it below!
