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 enhancing 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 while avoiding the common quagmire associated with them. It's not just another methodology; it's a framework of business thinking, organizing, behavior, and action, known as TOBA™, to effectively achieve project and business capability outcomes.
Prosultant® combines my experience in project management and business capability, enhanced by industry research.
Whether you're a business professional aiming for greater engagement and influence in technology projects or an IS team member seeking to improve project outcomes, Prosultant® offers the knowledge to help you reach your goals.
My first customer was the Manager of Labor Accounting at McDonnell Aircraft Company (now part of Boeing). He was a tough, experienced individual who didn't want anything to do with our internal IS department, Department 35, Systems & Procedures. Fresh out of college, my job was to earn his trust and cooperation to support his business needs so we could succeed.
Forty-plus years later, I still meet 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—serving as a management consultant and as a client—include:
Management consultants are knowledge intermediaries — knowledge nomads who distributes their experiences and expertise from one client to another.
The current distribution model benefits them but causes issues for client organizations.
As knowledge intermediaries and nomads, management consultants continually increase their profit pools by sharing knowledge generated from previous client organization CAPEX-OPEX investments with future clients.
Additionally, when they depart, the knowledge they have contributed to creating often leaves with them, creating a knowledge gap that, if left unaddressed, can cause significant disruption within 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 organizational peers -- a significant networking and margin opportunity that management consultants take advantage of.
Many organizations overuse management consultants to the detriment of their employees' growth and self-esteem.
I've worked with over 100 global 500, middle-market, and emerging organizations across the private and public sectors. Most of them, except for a few, had knowledgeable, competent, and eager-to-learn employees. They possessed equivalent, and often deeper, organization, industry, and functional knowledge than their management consulting counterparts.
●
Sure, there were exceptions, but every organization, including management consulting firms, has employees who should be performing at a higher level than they currently are.
●
Client employees often feel undervalued and unappreciated when management consultants take over their roles on critical assignments.
3. Promote Versatility
Many organizations need to create more versatility in their job classifications and roles.
Versatility sparks people's creativity and passion for their work, boosts organizational agility, and cuts costs.
A key hallmark of Capability Thinking® is role versatility. I've practiced versatility in building the Prosultant® Network by taking on many roles, including:
●
Author and Editor -- Writing education, advice, and know-how content.
●
Designer and Software Engineer -- Creating interactive, visual content and experiences.
●
Technical Engineer -- Configuring, securing, and agilely deploying cloud infrastructure.
Senior leadership often justifies assigning critical work to management consultants with the "speed to market" metaphor. This reasoning reveals their failure to invest in, organize, and develop innovative, connected, and agile internal teams.
Prosultant® addresses the three key needs above by instilling unique skills, principles, and disciplines within capability teams integrated into 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 familiar with social media and mobile devices, these technologies do not automatically make them more capable than previous generations in leveraging enterprise technologies, applications, and methods. Their knowledge in these areas still requires education, hands-on experience, and development.
Unleash the Talent and Creativity of Business Teams to Increase Technology ROI
Prosultant® helps business professionals and teams boost the performance and value of their technology investments. We offer creative playbooks, checklists, assessments, how-to guides, and organizational methods that consistently enhance project results.
These DIY resources provide compelling value by reducing your dependency on costly, self-serving management consultants and empowering your business teams to take ownership and lead mission-critical initiatives.
●
Inperva™: Create a culture of leadership and operational excellence.
●
Capability Thinking®: An organizational approach that helps you get more from your technology investments.
●
Consultant-in-a-Box®: Guide non-technical business professionals on project fundamentals using our Master Checklist.
●
Assess Projects™. Deliver successful project outcomes while supporting the health of your team members.
●
Optimize Decisions™. Master the Vendor Application Software Evaluation and Selection Process.
ABLE is an approach to delivering just-in-time know-how and guidance.
●
It blends transformative, experiential, and self-directed learning principles with rapid development tools and environments.
●
It helps business professionals learn and excel in their roles while actively working, instead of wasting time on unproductive, one-time learning learningware and classware that become shelfware.
●
It creates affordable, 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.
●
It includes a framework of 20 business capability principles to increase the performance and value of technology investments.
●
It's a pathway to achieve differentiating and industry-leading business capabilities.
Use Capability Thinking® to create and extend industry-leading business capabilities agilely.
●
Embed Business Capability teams into business operations.
●
Pivot from project-centric to Capability Thinking®: Shift ownership of technology investment, project, and capability life cycle processes from IT to business teams.
●
Boost business team ownership, engagement, and influence on technology projects through adopting Capability Thinking®.
Educate business team members before their project engagement begins using our Master Checklists.
Increase business team engagement and influence on technology projects.
●
Use the checklists to guide and educate business team members on technology projects and serve as an ongoing resource to reduce project failure risks.
Unfortunately, many organizations and teams often fall victim to conventional thinking and everyday situations that lead to project problems 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.
●
Vendor service, support, security, sustainability, innovation, cultural fit, experience, capability extension, and partnership thinking are crucial solution elements that teams must evaluate during decision processes.
Evaluate and select vendor software using either an enhanced traditional RFP or an agile non-RFP approach to accelerate business outcomes.
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.
●
Trust is a valuable currency that must be earned, but it can greatly decrease non-value-added activities and save time when it is present.
●
Business teams are truly empowered to handle their missions and deliver meaningful results through team member roles and flexible policies — completing actions with minimal organizational intervention, friction, and review.
Critical tenets of Capability Thinking® include:
●
Recruit agile thinkers -- those professionals who can agilely traverse strategic to tactical thinking and action.
●
Retain, rotate, recognize, and reward them frequently.
●
Refresh and nurture their know-how continuously using on-demand, virtual bodies of know-how and peer organization engagement.
●
Empower them and their teams as they earn trust, freeing them from organizational policies aimed at catching the few bad apples. And enable them to take on versatile roles.
●
Give them the freedom to innovate and produce unique results.
●
Eliminate the numerous shadow organizations and roles in project thinking that lead to unclear communications, delays, and CAPEX/OPEX waste.
●
Utilize business governance frameworks and rhythms to promote ownership, responsibility, and flexibility.
A non-RFP approach to evaluating and selecting vendor solutions.
