C-D-EC Model: Consulting-Delivery-Extended Consulting/Collaboration Date:   Friday , February 04, 2011 Are you faced with questions like: 'Consulting - Is it an Expense or an Investment?' 'Strategy - Is it just a jargon or a savior?' 'Roadmap – Is it on track as planned? How do I do a health check?' Corporates over a period had invested a lot of money in tools and technologies to cater to the needs of various departments within their organization. This has now started to eat into their profits through licensing costs, maintenance costs, etc. Sometimes one has lost count of the number of application in the landscape, has no clue what a particular application is for, who is using it and why it was needed in the first place? The impact of this has become even more evident especially during the recession period as the IT budgets became slim and expectations from the top management to cut costs increased. The CIO now needs to strategize IT spends to manage costs within the budget. This paper tries to address where the CIO can start and how to leverage the services provided by various IT service providers. Recession hit Industry: During recession, quite a few Corporates had employed IT consultants to increase their productivity and cut costs. They achieved this by trying to get a neutral third party view of where they were and what they needed to do next to sustain themselves during recession. These corporates were primarily looking at consolidation and/or optimization of their existing setup and re-org in some cases. Situation in the IT Services industry: IT service providers realized the need for value added services in the market and forayed into the consulting services spectrum. This was not set up just to help the clients come out of recession but also sustain themselves during the recession. A problem to note here is that the consulting and delivery are two separate arms inside the same organization. No doubt, there are pros & cons to this setup. Let's ask the question, "Can Consulting survive another recession, if it were to happen in the near term?" The answer would be consulting might not survive as well as it did in the last recession as most of the companies would now have already or just about gone through a fairly large consolidation and optimization exercise. So in order to survive the next recession, consulting will now have to start looking at new avenues through which it can find in-roads into their clients and keep the consulting arm from taking a hit. The Solution: Typically there is a strategy phase and an implementation phase. The missing piece is a continual monitoring/improvement phase. While consulting takes care of the strategic piece and delivery takes care of the implementation, "Extended consulting" can take care of continual monitoring/improvement. To sustain the consulting industry in the long run, a strong link between the consulting and delivery arm needs to be created now. The result of this link would be the C-D-EC (Consulting-Delivery-Extended consulting/collaboration) model. The advantage here is twofold. One, it helps the consultants re-look at their existing framework and build better frameworks. Two, a minor tweak to the original recommendation based on user feedback can go a long way in terms of user buy-in and satisfaction levels. If consulting and delivery is done by the same vendor, initial homework can be done in-house by letting the consulting team interact with the delivery team. This will enable the consultants to study what was carried out and come up with tweaks before they can go back to the client and make amendments to their initial recommendations. C-D-EC (Consulting-Delivery-Extended Consulting/Collaboration) model Consulting models followed by organizations globally when mapped to a six-sigma methodology would indicate that it only addresses a portion of it. When the delivery team completes the implementation, we can say 80% of DMAIC methodology has been addressed. C-D-EC model is based on the lines of six-sigma and addresses the complete DMAIC methodology. The engagement starts with the consulting phase (Define-Measure-Analyze) to understand and define the client’s problem, walk-through their landscape, measure (quantify) the bottle-necks, and analyze the findings by base-lining each identified parameter. End result would be the typical recommendations and implementation roadmap. When the delivery team completes the implementation, we can say that the Improve phase has been addressed. What we have seen till now is what is being followed in the Industry as of today. The Control phase is either left out completely or addressed in parts through a maintenance & support program. The problem with addressing the control phase through maintenance & support is that, it takes time to realize the complete benefit of the investment made. For example, the support team can take a few months to just stabilize and familiarize themselves with the environment. This is because the development team normally does not end up as the support team. Hence, on an average it takes anywhere between four to five months for the support team to figure out possible areas for enhancement. Let’s see how bringing the consulting team back, post-implementation can reduce this time lag. Extended Consulting: The consulting team is brought back to study the gaps, understand how the users are interacting with the new setup, collect their feedback and propose an Optimize & Sustain strategy. This could be as simple as tweaking the processes/recommendations proposed initially or bringing in a completely new perspective like a collaboration that could take the setup to a completely new level. Benefits of CDEC over CD: 'Ability to Re-assess and re-align the roadmap in large deals, especially roadmaps which are two years and above.' 'Ability to fine tune the proposed solution keeping the current market situation in mind.' 'Consultants get an in-road back into the client’s organization to look for new business opportunities.' 'Sustain a long-term relationship.' Framework for Extended Consulting: Having brought the consulting team back in, questions like where should one start, how should we go about doing this, can we follow the same methodology, will arise. One cannot follow the same methodology as it will be an overload and a downplayed version is required. Key components of this downplayed version are given by the ACUTE methodology. ACUTE (Analyze, Compare and gather User feedback to Trigger Enhancement) Analyze The setup, post implementation is studied at a high level to check for completeness and accuracy with which the implementation has been done. This is purely from a technical perspective. Compare Details collected in the analyze phase is compared against the recommendations. Gaps are identified with root cause and impact of the same. It would be an added advantage to interact with the development team(s) here. User Feedback User feedback is collected on key parameters like usability, productivity and user-friendliness. Only the actual users will be part of this phase. Trigger Enhancement Findings from Compare phase and user feedback are studied and alternate solutions, tweaks to the earlier recommendations/processes wherever required is drafted. Conclusion “Who does it, does not matter. Is it done, is what that matters”. In today’s scenario, this model is a win-win for both the consultants and the clients. The authors are Consultant and Senior Associate in the Innovation Group at CognizantTechnology Solutions respectively