Increase the Performance and Value of Your Technology Investments
Why Prosultant®?
As a business professional, you understand the challenges and complexities of managing technology projects and improving ROI. Prosultant® shares knowledge and experience to help others navigate these challenges more effectively.
Many organizations haven't realized three critical needs for increasing performance and value.
1. Improve Relationships Between Business and IT
I created Prosultant® for business professionals to successfully engage, navigate, and influence technology projects and avoid the quagmire often associated with those projects. It's not another methodology. Instead, it's a framework of business thinking, organizing, behavior, and action, aka TOBA™, to successfully achieve project and business capability outcomes.
Prosultant® is a compilation of my project and business capability experience, supplemented by industry research.
Whether you're a business professional seeking a higher degree of engagement and influence on technology projects or an IS team member wanting to elevate the quality of project outcomes, Prosultant® provides the know-how to achieve your goals.
My first customer was the Manager of Labor Accounting at McDonnell Aircraft Company (now part of Boeing.) He was a crusty, seasoned individual who did not want anything to do with our internal IS department, Department 35, Systems & Procedures. Fresh from college, my job was to gain his trust and cooperation in supporting his business needs so we could succeed.
Forty+ years later, I still encounter business professionals who want nothing to do with their internal IS groups.
2. Unleash Employee Talent
Two insights from career experiences on both sides of the table -- as a management consultant and as a client include:
Management consultants are knowledge intermediaries -- knowledge nomads who distribute their experiences and know-how from one client to the next.
The current distribution model is profitable for them and problematic for client organizations.
As knowledge intermediaries and nomads, management consultants continually enhance their margin pools by distributing knowledge created by past client organization CAPEX-OPEX investments to future clients.
Also, when they leave, the knowledge they helped create for their client often goes with them, leaving a knowledge gap that, if not addressed, wreaks havoc in the client's organization.
While organizations seek internal ROI from their investments, they rarely leverage and monetize the know-how created from those investments with their organization peers -- a considerable networking and margin opportunity that management consultants benefit from.
Many organizations overuse management consultants to the detriment of their employees' growth and self-esteem.
I've consulted with over 100 global 500, middle-market, and emerging organizations across the private and public sectors. Most of them, except for a handful, had knowledgeable, competent, and willing-to-learn employees. They brought equivalent and, in many cases, deeper organization, industry, and functional knowledge than their management consulting counterparts.
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Sure, there were exceptions, but every organization, including management consulting firms, has employees who should be performing at a higher level than they are.
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Client employees often feel undervalued and unappreciated when management consultants usurp their engagement on critical assignments.
3. Promote Versatility
Many organizations need to design more versatility in their job classification and roles.
Versatility ignites people's creativity and passion for their work, increases organizational agility, and reduces costs.
A key hallmark of Capability Thinking® is role versatility. I've practiced versatility in creating the Prosultant® Network by embracing many roles, including:
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Author and Editor -- Writing education, advice, and know-how content.
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Designer and Software Engineer -- Creating interactive, visual content and experiences.
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Technical Engineer -- Configuring, securing, and agilely deploying cloud infrastructure.
Senior leadership frequently rationalizes assigning critical work to management consultants using the "speed to market" metaphor. This rationale exposes their failure to invest in, organize, and nurture innovative, networked, and nimble internal teams.
Prosultant® solves the three vital needs above by instilling differentiating masteries, principles, and disciplines in capability teams embedded in business operations, not IT.
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
Maimonides
Mission
Prosultant® delivers differentiating and impactful project and capability know-how at a compelling value to help non-technical business professionals increase the performance and value of technology investments.
Note: While Millennials and Gen-Zers may be more comfortable with social media and mobile devices, those applications and technologies by no means make them any more capable than their generational predecessors in harnessing the power of enterprise technologies, applications, and methods. Their know-how in those areas requires education, experiential practice, and nurturing.
Unleash the Talent and Creativity of Business Teams to Increase Technology ROI
ABLE is an approach to delivering just-in-time know-how and guidance.
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It blends transformative, experiential, and self-directed learning principles with rapid development tools and environments.
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It supports business professionals in simultaneously learning and excelling at their roles while doing the do rather than participating in unproductive one-and-done learningware and classware that become shelfware.
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It establishes low-cost, high-performance, and less invasive global knowledge platforms.
Adults Learn Best by Doing.
Excel across three application software investment opportunities.
Eliminate project fiascos, rethink traditional project approaches, and create and agilely extend differentiating and impactful business capabilities by pivoting from project to Capability Thinking®.
Capability Thinking® is an unconventional approach to increasing technology project and business capability performance and value.
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It includes a framework of 20 business capability principles to increase the performance and value of technology investments.
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It's a path to achieve differentiating and industry-leading business capabilities.
Use Capability Thinking® to create and extend industry-leading business capabilities agilely.
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Embed Business Capability teams in business operations.
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Pivot from project to Capability Thinking®: Shift ownership of technology investment, project, and capability life cycle processes from IT to business teams.
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Increase business team ownership, engagement, and influence on technology projects by embracing Capability Thinking®.
Educate business team members before their project engagement begins using our Master Checklists.
Increase business team engagement and influence on technology projects.
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Use the checklists to orient and educate business team members on technology projects and as an ongoing guide to reduce project failure risks.
Unfortunately, many organizations and teams consistently succumb to conventional thinking and everyday circumstances that trigger project trouble and failure.
"We know why projects fail, we know how to prevent their failure -- so why do they still fail?" Martin Cobb, Former Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
Optimize vendor software decisions: Broaden vendor selection decision frameworks to include more than software criteria.
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Vendor service, support, security, sustainability, innovation, cultural fit, experience, capability extension, and partnerial thinking are crucial solution elements that teams must assess during decision processes.
Evaluate and select vendor software using an enhanced traditional RFP or an agile non-RFP (Request for Proposal) approach to accelerate business outcomes.
Increase the Productivity of Your Project, Technology, and Business Capability Investments by 10X.
By practicing Capability Thinking®, organizations unlock the potential of their teams and foster their creativity. This approach is based on trust and leverages emerging trends in the workforce, technology, and learning.
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Trust is a valuable currency that must be earned, but it can significantly reduce non-value-added activities and time consumption when it is present.
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Business teams are genuinely empowered to manage their missions and achieve impactful outcomes through team member roles and policy versatility -- complete actions with minimal organizational intervention, friction, and review.
Critical tenets of Capability Thinking® include:
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Recruit agile thinkers -- those professionals who can agilely traverse strategic to tactical thinking and action.
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Retain, rotate, recognize, and reward them frequently.
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Refresh and nurture their know-how continuously using on-demand, virtual bodies of know-how and peer organization engagement.
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Empower them and their teams as they earn trust -- freeing them from organizational policies designed to catch the very few bad apples. And enable them to take on versatile roles.
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Provide them with creative license to deliver new thinking and differentiating outcomes.
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Eliminate the many shadow organizations and roles in project thinking that contribute to obfuscated communications, time delays, and CAPEX/OPEX waste.
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Leverage business governance structures and rhythms to instill ownership, accountability, and agility.
A non-RFP approach to evaluating and selecting vendor solutions.
