Micro Consulting
Customers engage consulting firms to leverage their expertise and supplement them for in-house resources. Traditionally consulting engagements require a great deal of pre-planning, evaluating different consulting firms, multiple rounds of contract negotiations, and project running into months to realize the expected outcome.
Modern and agile organizations are now looking at innovative ways to access the required expertise externally with minimum cost, risk, and with a potentially higher benefit. These organizations might just be looking for assistance with getting started with a project or initiative or require knowledge and experience to solve a business or technical problem. This is where Micro Consulting fits in.
Today’s customers are knowledgeable and have access to a large amount of relevant information. Therefore, micro consulting can help to support only for the gaps they need outside expertise.
What is Micro Consulting
Micro Consulting is short burst of engagement with Experts in specific areas to deliver specific outcome for your new initiatives. Micro Consulting breaks the engagement into small “chunks” of work and helps in achieving the desired outcome in short time period (for e.g., from 1 hr to 1 week). In the current VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous), you don’t have time and budget for long duration consulting engagement when the external environments are changing rapidly. Compared to most traditional consulting engagements, Micro Consulting is delivered through internet without the need for face to face interaction saving large costs of travel and accommodation. Consequently, Micro Consulting helps to reduce the budget pressures, lengthy engagement, execution risks.
Why Micro Consulting
Internet has revolutionized the access to knowledge and today you have the ability to analyze and formulate new initiatives that can grow the organization. However, now and then you wish to have ideas validated by an Industry Expert or Supplement your ideas with missing piece of information. Hence, You only need to have quick conversations with experts or engage them for specific needs. Micro Consulting helps to work with frugal budget, shorter time frame and still achieve the business goals.
You don’t need power point decks running into 100s of pages or engagement running into months. Micro Consulting helps to experiment, implement new initiatives in a matter of weeks instead of months to realize benefits faster.
How Micro Consulting works
Delivery of micro consulting can happen through online leveraging digital technologies.
Steps 1. Define specific areas where additional expertise for supplementing in-house knowledge. Laser focused scope is key to success.
Step 2. Identify Expert(s) in the specific area to execute the project scope.
Steps 3. Engage with the Experts through short burst of consulting engagement to realize the outcome.
Micro Consulting Examples
Following are some scenarios where Micro-Consulting engagements can help to connect with experts and fill the knowledge/skill gap quickly. For e.g.
1. Insights and Opinions : Understanding Additive Manufacturing for your production methodology
2. Discussing and Recommending Industry 4.0 for Production Facility to reduce costs and improve efficiency operations
3. You want to explore how your product usage can be tracked
4. Review in Formulating Digital Strategy based on company vision
5. Review the plan for digitizing operations
Micro Consulting Benefits
Micro Consulting offers many benefits for customers to engage with external consultants quickly and efficiently.
Focused Scope - Small chunks of projects are planned based on Big Initiatives, eliminating the need for pre-planning and lengthy contract negotiations.
Accessing the best Knowledge - By having short burst of consulting engagements you have the ability to assess and build trust with consultants who can supplement you with needed expertise.
Lower Budget - No need for committing upfront. You can review the progress and decide the next course of action.
Short Duration & Faster ROI - Micro Consulting helps to realize the outcome in shorter duration.