Assessing What is Needed – Some Key Questions to Begin
After you have determined what your consulting customer wants and you have an agreement to work together, you can turn your attention to discovering what is needed to achieve their desired outcome. This phase of consulting may be referred to as “assessment”.
A trap at this point is to begin observing and collecting information without first getting clear on key questions to be answered in order to prepare a solid set of recommendations for the client. Another trap is to limit assessment to description of existing problems or needs. A third trap is to miss obtaining buy-in from key stakeholders.
The key in our experience is to focus on an assessment endpoint which produces:
a) a draft of one or more SMART supporting results that together enable the customer to obtain their outcome, and
b) a set of resources and action options to most efficiently achieve those results.
To conduct assessment in this way, we recommend asking and answering the 3 sets of questions below:
1) Results Alignment:
Relative to achieving your customer’s desired outcome, what are the wants or needs of key stakeholders who may be impacted by this outcome, or upon whom the customer’s outcome may depend?
These stakeholders could be employees, family members, customers served, suppliers, investors, or others who have significant importance or influence related to your consulting customer’s outcome.
What specific results would fulfill these needs, and how can these results support achievement of your customer’s outcome? (You are looking for high alignment between stakeholder results and client outcome.)
Which of these results would have the highest leverage in realizing your client’s outcome?
2) Current situation:
Relative to each of these key results, what is the current situation or state of affairs?
3) Actions to Get from A to B:
Given the answers to questions in #1 and #2 above, and your knowledge of what the client wants, what are the actions or resources needed to realize the customer’s desired outcome? Which of these resources are available to the client now, and which need to be added? Which of the latter could you provide?
Answering these questions will help you understand and describe what results and actions are needed to most efficiently move the client and associated stakeholders from their current situation to the desired outcome. Assessment is treated in more detail in our workshop “Consulting Tools” at http://www.aligned4results.com/ToolsforConsultingOverview.html .
Randy and Susan
© Aligned for Results, LLC