Implementation / Operational / Project Consulting

In 2023, President Obama summarized something I was starting to realize for myself: what’s really valuable is getting stuff done. Sure, everyone wants to appear smart and talk about being strategic, but for all the planning and analyzing and forecasting, the real value is generated (or not!) when “the rubber meets the road” and the plan is implemented. (Throwing in some nice consulting cliches in here to keep it real!)

Obama’s advice was framed as “his most important career for young people,” and frankly, he’s spot-on (but of course he is) - I only wish he had shared it so succinctly ten years earlier so I could have benefited when I was graduating from college!

Here’s the full quote, before we move on: “Get stuff done. Just learn how to get stuff done. I’ve seen at every level people who are very good at describing problems, people who are very sophisticated in explaining why something went wrong or why something can’t get fixed, but what I’m always looking for is no matter how small the problem or how big it is, somebody who says, ‘Let me take care of that.’”

(Side note, this advice lines up really well with Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, which I also highly recommend because it imparts a great paradigm to think about employment, work, and what makes a career.)

What does this have to do with consulting? Many - if not most - consulting firms help their clients by making things happen. The client has anything ranging from a vision (only the vaguest sense of the outcome they desire) to a plan, and they’re hiring you to bring it to life. Sometimes they’ve already hired a firm like McKinsey to “form the strategy,” and they’re hiring someone else (that is, a cheaper firm) to execute upon that strategy.

McKinsey has a whole arm dedicated to turning strategies into realities, and they call it their Implementation team. Smaller firms may still brand and advertise themselves as “strategy consulting” firms, but either do less of the “blue-sky strategy” stuff or, more likely, do a bit of both. The ideal project sequence is likely to start with an engagement that “forms the strategy” and then follow up with an implementation of that strategy. The term “pull-through” gets used a lot.

Even when the strategy or vision is pre-formed or decided upon, there’s usually some element of validating the work another firm has done, and/or additional market research to be done. That’s why so many firms whose main business is “pull-through” and “implementation” work still get to call themselves “strategy consulting firms” - in a way, they are. (But then again, in a way everything you do has to be strategic. Did I not mention the word “strategy” is overused and its meaning diluted?)

Making something happen within an organization inevitably involves project management. Don’t worry if you don’t have a certification like a PMP (or any of the variations from the Project Management Institute) - you really don’t need one! The trickiest part of getting anything done that involves more than one person is just communication. Admittedly the communication challenges don’t multiply linearly as the number of stakeholders increase, but there is no bullet-proof framework that will guarantee project delivery perfection. Good project management is about being adaptable and being able to read the room. True, taking good notes and being organized (so you can access those notes) gives you a huge leg up as well!

How to parse out if the “strategy consulting firm” before you is a Type 1 “Grand Blue-Sky ‘Strategy’” firm or one of these Type 3 implementation firms? Ask about project length. Type 1 projects can usually wrap up in 3-4 months. Granted, very specific and well-defined implementation projects can too, but they are also sometimes “without end” (because you finish standing up one project and then there’s another…) - at the very least you might start hearing longer timelines, like 6-8 months or even more. 

It also wouldn’t be strange to find fractional staffing models at Type 3 firms. Fractional staffing means you work on multiple projects at the same time, often different client organizations entirely, or sometimes different client teams. This is usually possible because implementation projects have a slower pace, and there isn’t so much work to be done that everyone on the project will have a full plate all the time. Firms will thoughtfully add a little variety to your workload, in hopes that the “peaks” will be somewhat evenly spread up, so your workload per project might fluctuate, but you, the employee, will never be idle. (“How often does that work out as planned?” you ask? How often are we humans correctly able to predict the future?)

“Get stuff done. Just learn how to get stuff done. I’ve seen at every level people who are very good at describing problems, people who are very sophisticated in explaining why something went wrong or why something can’t get fixed, but what I’m always looking for is no matter how small the problem or how big it is, somebody who says, ‘Let me take care of that.’”

- Barack Obama

Keywords for this type of ambiguous, run-the-whole-gamut and make-it-happen work:

• Implementation

• Executional

• Operationalize

• Pull-through

• Actualize

• Project management

• Cross-functional coordination

• Stakeholder management

What’s in a day?

You may or may not travel, especially in this post-COVID world of continued hybrid working. Depending on your firm, if you do travel, you will either get the regular four-day week at your client’s office location or just have to show up “on site” periodically for important meetings and/or presentations.

If your project(s) involve any strategy work, you’ll get all the things mentioned for Grand Blue-Sky “Strategy.” Your work in implementation and project management will likely involve:

• Making and/or updating lots of Gantt charts (or other ways to visualize timelines)

• Possible usage of project management programs to track tasks, deliverables, due dates, dependencies (examples of these that are currently hot include Monday, Smartsheet, Asana, Jira, Basecamp, Airtable…)

• Defining RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed) charts and writing project charters (sadly, both these documents are useful in theory to “get everyone on the same page” but in practice seem often ignored upon completion)

• Hosting and/or attending lots of regular status meetings that may or may not actually yield new information

• Creating and updating “dashboards” that are actually PowerPoint slides; these dashboards can be formatted in various ways, but the purpose is really to capture progress updates and identify areas that need interference and/or assistance - you might see red/yellow/green (or other similar type of) indicators of workstream status

• Attending meetings that your client is invited to, sometimes alongside your client, sometimes in their stead