I own a consultancy that delivers into the financial services industry. We have both large and small clients. We generally get called in to large organisations because they are unable to deliver internally for a range of reasons. It’s not always easy to define what success is in these organisations. As a consultancy, there’s an “us versus them” mental image which might suggest that “them” is homogenous; but that’s about as far from the truth as it gets. You’re inevitably dealing with half a dozen different individuals or groups who want to help you succeed; who are ambivalent; or who actively want you to fail. So our goal is to find out who each of those groups are so that we can engage with them in the appropriate way.

The start begins before you’ve won the project. You need to identify who you’re engaging with in pre-sales - some percentage of the pre-sales prototypes turn into a project that you win, which helps identify the key players. Also, it is significantly different if you’re brought in by the business who want to roll out a new idea, versus IT who want to fix a pain point that they have. You also need to get the people who didn’t bring you on board on your side to be successful. From the IT side, there’s a bunch of things that we do - most of which has come from the realisation that the IT people don’t like working with consultants in case they show them up or tell them how to do their jobs. We quickly work towards a culture where they realise that we’re not here to take the glory for the project; they can take the kudos for the project. On the business side we highlight the quality and focus of different styles of project management, with the idea that there will be some in the business side who haven’t heard of the benefits of these styles or otherwise dislike it on principle. So we spend time talking to them asking about what their goals are on a quarterly basis, and shield them from the internal project management. It’s about empathy and having those conversations. The other trick that we’ve learnt is learning how far you can push it before things break while still keeping them happy. There’s a resistance to pushing too far because they’re scared about the end of year review process or stack ranking. We’re in a lucky position because we’re coming in from the outside and we can push until almost breaking point. We try and push far enough that we don’t necessarily aim to make friends, but we need to get the organisation over some pain points. Depending on who has brought you in, you have more or less clout depending on their political capital. Understanding the politics and finding out who are the problem characters, what you can do to make them succeed, or how to steamroller over if it can’t be changed.