What should you look for when hiring an agile business consultant?

The typical image I have of a failing leadership team is of frustrated individuals struggling to deliver anything slowly, working in isolation from each other. Often they are pleased to bring in an impressive agile consultant (and slides) and after 6 months of ‘change’ there may be loads of sticky notes plastered on the walls, all the teams could have been renamed as “Scrum Teams” or whatever and numbers would have fallen by pretty much exactly the same amount as before the ‘change’ started. The consultant would have moved on to the next challenge by this time.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. It is its own genre of transformation that brings about little to no results.

Business-consultants versus typical IT-consultants. How do you tell? Three ways. None of them relate to certificates.

Don’t get caught up in the consultancy badge club – forget the badge, look for the scar tissue

Here is a set of key differences between consultants that can deliver results and those who cannot and those who will intentionally or unintentionally drain your resources.

Lastly, ask the consultant about a failed transformation. Most will spin a successful story for their failure to deliver results for you. But how did they get it wrong? If the consultant has learned from his or her mistakes then that is something that you can also learn from. The consultant can share their failed transformation with you and tell you specifically what he or she got wrong. Listen for stammering as the consultant transitions from a successful story to that of failed results for you. That transition will give you insight into what the consultant believes caused the results that did not occur for you in the end.

True organisational change is messy and takes time. It can be slowly walking before it starts to run. If someone suggests that your company can change quickly then they probably have not done it before.

The listening test (which most consultants fail)

A very successful agile business consultant engagement (as opposed to a very successful agile consultant engagement) is one where the consultant spent way more time listening in the first 2 weeks than they spent talking. They were actually mapping out the consultant’s real system as opposed to projecting out what they thought the consultant’s system should look like based on some framework that they are experts in.

A company is not a piece of white paper, waiting to be sketched on. A company has a long history, most of which is obvious, but some hidden. There are formal structures, and there are also informal structures of how things really get done. There are unwritten rules, governing almost everything. And there are plenty of cultural ‘antibodies’ which will fight any framework or process, once the consultant has left the company and is no longer paying for the consultant’s time. A good consultant respects a company’s complexity and does not try to impose a process on the organization.

Leaders who want to stay informed about evolving business practices often benefit from exploring trusted technology insights that cover digital transformation, innovation, and practical strategies for modern organizations. 

If you want to bring some support to your organization (or help it), then find someone who will contest your assumptions early (as gently as possible), but who will not try to “sell” you a solution (as that will only cost you lots in the long run). Remember, if someone agrees with everything you say at your first meeting then they are not aligning with you. They are agreeing with you (i.e. selling you a bill of goods).

Below is a comparison of Business Agility Consultants by key characteristics that separate weak from strong practitioners.

What you’re evaluating	Red flag	Green flag
Approach to diagnosis	Jumps straight to framework recommendations	Asks about current workflows before proposing anything
Handling failure	Can’t name a project that didn’t go to plan	Gives a specific example and explains what they learned from it
Stakeholder engagement	Works mostly with the transformation team in isolation	Pulls in finance, ops, and leadership early
Exit strategy	Vague about when or how they’ll hand over	Defines capability-building milestones from day one

The dependency trap

I see this with some, but not with others. This is something I can likely work on.

Good Agile Consultants want to become unnecessary for their customers. If you hire agile business consultant and after a few months there is nothing left but the fancy paintings on the walls then you have been exploited. A good Agile Consultant should help your organization to grow such that after a few months there is no need anymore for the Consultant of the organization. This could mean that other Consultants are grown, that leaders are grown that can sequence work under uncertainty or that teams run their retrospective without an external voice.

Another important thing to look out for is the dependency trap that some consultants can create. By this, I mean that the consultant in question never talks about exit from the consultants work that you have engaged them for. They never talk about how you can start to do things for yourself once they have been working with you. They never discuss how you can start to develop your own internal capability to carry on the work that they have been teaching you once they have handed you over. This type of dependency is very expensive and something that you need to be wary of. You should ask your potential consultant what their handoff plan is. How would they hand over work to you or your team? What would you look for in order to know when to stop paying them for their services. Any amount of hesitation from a potential consultant in answering this question is informative.

(There’s something almost paradoxical about this. The best agile consultants are working toward their own obsolescence from day one. The ones who aren’t tend to linger.)

Questions worth asking before you commit

• Can you walk me through how you’d approach the first 30 days in our specific context, not some hypothetical generic one?
• Who on your team will actually be on-site week to week, and what direct experience do they have in our industry?
• What metrics will we use to evaluate progress, and who has authority to define them?
• How do you handle sustained resistance from senior leaders who aren’t genuinely bought in?

2) Resistance from senior leaders within an organization to the changes that Business Agility requires to implement. If senior leaders are not on board with needed changes then how would the external consultant go about and implement Business Agility changes to the organization. A good external consultant will share with you real life examples that occurred in prior roles that the external consultant worked in, and the actual results or end state that senior leaders and the organization were transformed into as a result of the external consultant’s guidance and work. Many external consultants will give you very nice sounding answers, full of optimism for change as to how they can get senior leaders aligned to the business goals and objectives by running a number of highly effective workshops. It is important to get past all of the nice answer and really find out from any external consultant how they would handle senior resistance to Business Agility change in your organization. There is nothing worse than a slow growing wound of resistance to change from senior leaders in an organization that can kill an Agile transformation. Therefore be sure to test an external consultants ability to handle such a scenario by inquiring about prior examples in which the external consultant had to work with senior leaders that were resistant to change and share their approach to achieving Business Agility change in an organization with you and answer any questions that you may have regarding their past approaches and results. One or two examples should be enough to give you a sense of an external consultant’s ability to work with senior leaders that are resistant to change.

One more thing, and I’ll keep this brief

The right consultant won’t promise you smooth sailing but they will say that things will get uncomfortable at times. Some processes will have to be torn down and rebuilt but in the end the organization itself will do the majority of the work. Not the consultant.

There is a fine line between the honest business consultant who explains the difficulties that lie ahead for you, and the negative pessimist who only ever looks at the gloomy side of business. Be wary of the rosy picture painted by business consultants for your business before they start work. If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is. However, someone who paints a very bleak picture for your business before they start work can also be problematic, at least you will know what to expect before it starts.