Before a Consulting Project, Walk the Work

The solution arrives too early

A company can buy a program before it has described the problem it wants the program to solve. Dr. Tom DePaoli’s Business Consulting Wows presentation warns against that sequence. Its first move is to understand how work is actually done and to hear from the employees who know its delays. A new system, consultant, or slogan may help later, but none can replace the initial observation. The employee who processes a request may know that the real obstacle is missing information from another team. The manager who sees only the final metric may assume a different cause. A careful first week gives the project a better starting point.

Follow a task end to end

Choose one representative task and walk its path. Where does it begin? Who receives it next? Which steps are repeated, and where does someone wait for approval? Ask the people at each handoff what they need from the previous person and what they must repair. Tom recommends direct contact with the floor and the customer as well as process mapping. The map is useful when it records reality, including informal workarounds. Do not demand a perfect account from the first employee you meet; compare perspectives across the process. The person who starts the work and the person who finishes it may describe different failures, both of which matter.

Choose a change people can see

Once a specific source of waste is visible, choose a bounded improvement. Remove a duplicate approval, clarify the information a requester must provide, or make a handoff explicit. Invite the people who do the task to help design the test. A small change is easier to evaluate than a company-wide announcement, and it gives employees evidence that their knowledge influenced the project. Tom links this approach to methods such as Kaizen, but the discipline matters more than the label: observe, ask, simplify, and check. A consulting team that leaves the organization better able to repeat that cycle has provided more than a slide deck.

Keep the relationship honest

Return after the test and ask whether the change helped the whole process. A removed step may save one group time while sending more work to another. Explain what was learned and which question remains open. Tom’s presentation also emphasizes ethics and durable relationships; that includes how a leader treats employees during a project. Fear can make a diagram look cleaner than reality because people hide the workarounds they rely on. Give colleagues a reason to speak honestly, keep commitments about follow-up, and acknowledge when the first idea was wrong. The work will be more useful for it. Before adding the next tool, ask whether the team can describe the process and its customers clearly.

A useful first-week note should fit on one page: the task observed, the people consulted, the handoffs that created delay, and the question still unanswered. Share it with those people before presenting it to executives. They may correct a misunderstanding or point to an exception that changes the proposed fix. That check is a modest act of respect and an inexpensive way to keep the project grounded in real work.

Hear Dr. Tom explain the idea in the book presentation, then explore the book for the full account.