- The value of hiring a business process consultant
- When and why to hire one
- What to expect
Business process consultants make workflow seamless and of high quality.
They carefully research, analyze and recommend business processes to make it easy to implement your operations with zero waste and optimal efficiency.
With duties ranging from accurately documenting current workflows and processes to identifying opportunities for improvement, and prioritizing and eliminating redundant processes, business process consultants are highly skilled, competent, and experienced personnel.
This is why it is difficult to get qualified ones in the consultants’ marketplace.
Many companies lose 20%-30% of their yearly revenue to inefficiencies, so they are in dire need of a qualified and experienced business process consultant.
A report by Entelo Recruiting found that talent acquisition professionals spend more than 30% of their workweek sourcing candidates for one position. And about one-third of these professionals spend over 20 hours doing so.
In this post, I will show you five things to consider before hiring a business process consultant.
Want To Hire a Business Process Consultant for Your Company? Here are 5 Things to Consider Before Doing So
1. Define Your Needs
It is exhausting to decide to hire a business process consultant without properly defining your business needs.
Defining what and why you want one in the first place will enable you to get value for hire.
Your “what” could be that you want to hire the consultant to get expert insights, business process audits, or help with the lack of resources needed to pull the service.
While your “why” could be that you’re hiring the business process consultant to find and automate specific tasks to remove bottlenecks and save time. Could it even be to implement business process improvement solutions?
Whatever your needs are, by clearly articulating them, you will be able to set specific and measurable goals at the outset of your business relationship and set timelines to measure the intangible deliverables.
2. Check Their Track Records
If you were to hire a content marketing agency to handle your marketing projects, what’s the first thing you’d do?
Check their testimonials, previous results, and case studies, isn’t it?
Similarly, before engaging any consultant, it’s essential to check their track records to see projects they’ve implemented in the past, how satisfied their clients are, and the impact they’ve had in the space.
While doing this, you’d check their educational backgrounds, industry experience, work samples, references, and work style.
It will be wise to make sure that the consultant has some background experience in your business core, as this will help them quickly grasp your industry-related concepts when working with your team.
Depending on your goals, hiring a specialist versus a generalist will come into play.
While a specialist will be best if you perceive the problem as ultra-specific, a generalist will be much better if the scope is broader. He or she will pull from different experiences and across various industries to proffer creative solutions.
3. Ensure Timing Fit
Business process consultants are busy professionals, and given the shortage of highly qualified ones, it’s challenging to have one available anytime you need.
Business process consultants can bring fresh thinking to regain traction for projects with lost momentum, for they are not occupied with other responsibilities that might affect your job.
While this is a solid requirement to achieve success, you must be sure that your in-house managers are taken off distracting responsibilities to bring clarity, and actively contribute to the project.
So consider discussing the best quality time with the consultant.
That said, you should also understand that providing business process solutions takes time, and you don’t want consultants forcing a model on your company.
You want them to take the time to do their job before proffering solutions.
So ensure you pick a suitable time fit for your employees and consultant, so both parties get the information needed and work in synergy to execute the project entirely.
4. Know Their Working Style
From communication to the right personality, work ethics, getting the job done, and integrity, examine the consultant’s working style before you kick off the deal. It would be accurate to speak to some of their past clients.
This is important because you don’t want to process the first tranche of payment only to find out that the consultant you’ve hired isn’t patient enough to think systemically.
For instance, you hired a consultant who only thinks actively in his zone, maybe in his office. So he gathers information from your team and goes back to his area to analyze and come up with an implementation framework.
What if, along the line, there is a need to speak with a member of your team? He would have to do that on-call which may not suffice.
So make sure that the consultant is someone your team can comfortably work with.
If your team isn’t convinced that they can work with him or feel that there is no need to bring in a consultant, this might lead to cost wastage.
5. Aim to Get the Best Quality Job
If your need for hiring a consultant is at a high pain point, the cost or time it will take to solve the problem wouldn’t be an obstacle.
Some top management staff become so concerned about the cost of hiring business process consultants to the level that they unintentionally compromise quality.
Hiring a business process consultant can be pricey, but considering the end goal would make the cost reasonable.
The task of thoroughly examining and documenting current workflows, highlighting process gaps, identifying opportunities, and improving business processes isn’t a day’s job.
The process and experience that business process consultants play in solving these are why you shouldn’t let price be a distraction.
Instead, ask the consultant if the price will be worth the investment and request she submit a project report containing the deliverables and how it will impact the overall business process and profitability.
Conclusion
Now you’ve identified your goal for hiring a business process consultant, and you’ve done a proper check on their work ethics. Next is to decide on the amount you want to spend hiring before throwing out the net to hunt for your prospective business process consultant.
