When most of my clients talk about assessments, they relate past horror stories about consultants who couldn’t live up to more than the first three letters of either word. When I asked what went wrong, the most typical responses were either the consultant didn’t tell the client anything he didn’t already know or wasn’t able to truly target the client’s real business problems.
I see the root of the issue in the type of consultant often used to perform assessments. Many Business Analysts are consultants who are really good at capturing user-provided requirements and putting them into volumes of documentation for an eventual system implementation. The consultants who can go into a business and truly act as trusted advisors to the client tend to be few and far between.
One thing to look out for is any consultant who touts standardized assessment methodologies, use cases, etc. After having been involved in at least 20 different assessments myself, I’ve learned there are many different incarnations of assessments and there is no single approach that fits the needs of all business organizations. Assessments might be as diverse as one-week readiness report cards, detailed financial ROI analysis, vendor evaluations, technical road maps, etc.
At the end of the assessment, success can be gauged by the following:
- Has the problem been quantified in terms of impacts to the business and value of a solution?
- Has consensus been reached on what success looks like?
- Have the gaps between the end goal and current situation been identified?
- Is there a blueprint and road map that can be executed upon realistically in terms of cost and organizational dependencies?
All else said, assessments are invaluable in ensuring subsequent investments are made wisely. Too many clients make the mistake of skipping assessments because of past bad experiences.
