The Client-Consultant Relationship


Overview/Description
Target Audience
Expected Duration
Lesson Objectives
Course Number


Overview/Description
Getting to know your clients and their needs are the vital first steps to establishing productive working relationships. Understanding more about their organisations and what they expect from you will be essential if you are to provide a high-quality service that will delight them. You will also need to know how to recognise all the stakeholders and the real decision-makers within an organisation, and build teams that can function quickly and effectively.

Target Audience
Anyone with some specialist knowledge and general management experience who has recently moved, or is considering moving, into external consultancy.

Expected Duration (hours)
5.0

Lesson Objectives

Client Expectations

  • recognise the benefits of clarifying the consultant's role from the outset.
  • characterise the different roles that external consultants may fill.
  • determine the appropriate external consulting role to use in a given scenario.
  • identify confidentiality issues within an external consulting scenario.
  • determine what to do about confidentiality and conflict of interest issues in a given situation.
  • analyse the terms of reference for a given project to determine whether they adequately establish the project boundaries.

    • The Entry Phase

  • recognise the benefits of understanding the client organisation better from the start.
  • match different client types to the interest that they have in a project.
  • determine who the different decision-makers and clients are in a given external consulting situation.
  • match different types of organisational culture with their associated characteristics.
  • classify the culture of an organisation in a given consulting situation.
  • match the different methods of gathering information for a consulting assignment with the type of information gathered by each method.
  • analyse the type of information required, and how to gather it, in a given external consulting situation.

    • Creating a Partnership

  • recognise the benefit of building successful teams and partnerships with clients.
  • identify the characteristics of successful consulting teams.
  • determine the appropriate method for dealing with conflict in a given scenario.
  • match the elements of an external consulting contract with the associated characteristics of each element.

    • Course Number:
    CONS8112