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A project timeline is a central component in any good project management strategy. But as many management consultants have learned the hard way, creating and sticking to a timeline is not as easy as it sounds. Depending on the type of consulting engagement, many project elements – from people to technology to operational and market factors — can generate unexpected complications and delays, quickly throwing a project off-track.

Regardless, a project timeline is an important early step in time management planning and a necessary project management tool for educating your client and keeping your project on schedule and on budget. Whatever your consulting project entails, a detailed timeline enables a management consultant to:

• Give your client prompt, accurate status reports regarding what tasks are completed, due or behind schedule;

• Track your progress toward project goals, and determine whether you’re coming out on-target or behind in terms of payment;

• Identify potential setbacks and resolve them before they cause delays;

• Alert your client earlier to any potential delays – before they put the project behind and create liability for you as a management consultant;

• Invoice your client as project milestones are attained; and

• Monitor how long project components actually take, so you can better estimate time required for future projects.

Developing timelines

At first, developing reliable timelines can be a challenge. If you’ve ever started a consulting project with a schedule in hand, only to encounter setbacks that push your project off-schedule, committing to a timeline may feel like an exercise in futility.

But even if your timeline is just a rough estimate, it is still a useful tool for time management planning. It gives your client a visual aid for understanding how the project will flow, and demonstrates that you have a clear vision of the steps that need to happen to achieve specific project milestones. And, it can protect you against management consulting liability by helping you educate your client about the impact of potential project delays that are beyond your control.

To begin, talk to your client to define the major project milestones that must be accomplished during the course of the project. Use these milestones as the building blocks of your project timeline. Then, consider the steps that must take place to get from point A to point B, C, D and so on – and the logical order in which each step must be completed.

Think about what task must be accomplished in order to begin the next. If multiple tasks can be accomplished at the same time, chart them in parallel. If completing one task involves multiple sub-tasks, it may need a small timeline of its own.

When estimating the necessary time to accomplish each step, talk to the people who will be involved, and realistically consider the amount of time each person can commit to the project. Clearly define any project components for which the client’s team members are responsible, and set deadlines for accomplishing those tasks. Involve the stakeholders in setting these dates, and gain their commitment that they can meet the deadlines.

As you continue to employ timelines to track your projects, it will become easier to create future project timelines. Continually tracking your progress against your timelines gives you historical project management data that will help you estimate the time required for future management consulting projects.

Sticking to Timelines

One way to help ensure that you stick to your timeline is to build in a little extra wiggle room. For example, you might decide to develop two timelines: one for your own use, with more optimistic deadlines, and another, with later deadlines that you share with your client. Then, when you hit your own internal deadlines, you actually come out ahead of schedule in the client’s eyes. This project management method helps compensate for less-than-perfect estimates and unexpected events.

Another project management technique is to simply build a little extra buffer time into your schedule – particularly in areas where you suspect that your assumptions and estimations could potentially be off.

If at any point you find yourself falling behind schedule, look at the tasks coming up, and see if there is any way to dedicate time or resources to them early, so that you can make up for lost time later in the project.

Creating a realistic schedule often means that committed delivery dates will land farther out than your client would prefer. However, a practical project timeline demonstrates that you’ve considered everything it will take to get the job done right, and makes it more likely that you’ll accomplish what you’ve committed to.

Stay Flexible

No matter how hard you try to keep a project on track, the fact is, there are situations when you’ll need to adapt your project timeline.

It usually happens when you or other team members run into something you didn’t expect, such as an insurmountable technical glitch, budget cuts, operational restructuring or personnel turnover. It can also happen when client priorities shift mid-stream due to changing marketplace conditions, or when the client realizes that what they’ve asked for represents just a small part of a larger goal.

In these cases, you and all other project stakeholders must be willing alter your expectations and commitments. As the management consultant, consider the impact the changes will have on the time required to accomplish the project’s goals, and adapt your timeline accordingly. Any time you make a change, be sure to promptly inform everyone involved in the project of what has changed, and why.

By creating a realistic project timeline, and tracking progress against it as part of an overall project management strategy, you’re more likely to keep your management consulting project on-time and on-budget. Even if you fall behind, a timeline gives you a convenient and impressive tool for keeping your client informed of progress and the reasons for any delays. And an educated and informed client is more likely to be a loyal client.

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I first found Lillilooloo.com around 11pm on a Thursday night after a long and wasted evening spent trying to develop supply-chain analyses for a client. It is a site dedicated to management consultants and offers 3 basic services: 1) A free platform to share management consulting documents. 2) A back-office whereby users can commission the Lillilooloo.com team to produce reports and research. And, 3) a template store where users can sell their own documents for a fee. Three needed services rolled into one.

It is primarily a new user-generated content marketplace allowing anyone with the appropriate know-how and assets to upload, describe, tag and publish any professional document that may be of interest consultants, businesses and students. Users can also choose to sell documents on the site. So this works quiet well. Users can load teasers on the free site and documents for a fee in the template store. The documents in the free site are also very high quality.

This new site is unique in that I have never seen such a useful content marketplace to share high quality consulting documents. Users can easily upload, share and control their documents. What I found particularly nice was the access to so many documents for free. Most sites would have erected a pay wall. It seems they have chosen to make the documents free to drive traffic. This is a great strategy.

It does get better. When using the template store, Lillilooloo.com keeps just a fraction of the sales amount as a logistics fee. While some companies charge upwards of 30%, Lillilooloo.com charges just a 2% administration fee and the user keeps the rest. I also like the fact that they provide editorial guidance for documents submitted to the template store. This helps ensure consistency and quality.

KEY FEATURES/SERVICES

Lillilooloo.com, the new site for sharing high quality user-generated consulting and business documents, offers some very useful and sophisticated features across 3 services:

1.       A platform to upload, share and download high quality documents for free.

2.       A research back-office whereby reports can be commissioned from Lillilooloo.com for a fee and managed through the site.

3.       A marketplace to set a price and sell documents.

PLATFORM FOR FREE DOCUMENTS

Registered users can easily browse and upload any document (.doc, xls, .pdf, .ppt, .pptx, .xlsx, .docx), provide descriptive information, tags, synopsis for each and assign a copyright to it before it becomes available for others to view or download (if downloading is allowed). This is a great way to advertise and share documents. It is quite interesting that so many users have selected to share documents.

The search engine is versatile and searches across document types in the fields:

1.       Title

2.       Descriptions

3.       Tags

The site does not yet seem to have the functionality to search within documents.

Interesting documents can be previewed in a Flash-based viewer giving you the option to properly evaluate any document before downloading it.

Each user has also direct access to a My Home page, in which are listed all the documents you may have published as well as those downloaded, reviewed and chosen as a favourite.

The My Home page also allows the user to manage his or her social networks. Friends can be managed, invited and communicated with via this section of the site. The social networking functionality is basic and works well.

In your My Home page you can also rate the documents you have already uploaded, allowing others in the site to benefit from your own experience and feedback.

CREATE DOCUMENTS

In the My Home section, if you click on My Projects you come to a very easy to use back-office project management tool.

If you go to the premium section, you can commission the Lillilooloo.com research team to produce your slides or research report. It’s very simple to do this:

1.       Pick the type of service you need. They currently offer 9 different types of services.

2.       Pick a deadline date.

3.       Choose the number of slides or pages needed.

4.       Complete the questionnaire.

5.       Choose from one of three professional templates.

6.       Make a payment

Once payment is made, it shows up on the My Projects page and you can communicate with the research team. I found this to be a very useful function, and eventually used them to produce several slides on Supply Chain management. The entire communication can be archived on the site, attachments can be exchanged through the site and completed projects stored in perpetuity (at least that’s the case so far).

SELL DOCUMENTS

Users can simply complete a short questionnaire, upload their documents and leave everything up the administrators to review the document, make corrections and create a storefront. All documents can be viewed using a custom flash interface.

Lillilooloo.com-distributed documents can be bought by using PayPal, Google Checkout, Money bookers or any major credit card.

Users can fully decide the price of the documents they want to put on sale choosing any amount between 0 and $20.

There are some really good documents in this store. Members can rate documents, see ratings by other members; view the number of downloads and views of the document. It is a very transparent system.

INTERFACE

The Lillilooloo.com interface is refreshingly simple, very easy and straightforward to use. There is nothing to learn and each and every function is immediately evident to the end user.

Whether you are searching for a document on the free site, using the template store or using the back-office research service, everything is simple and intuitive. There is no need to worry about extracting the most value from the cleanly designed interface.

This is a sophisticated site designed to look simple. Legibility, layout, and the overall information design have been done professionally, with great concern and attention to the reduction of distractive components and with elegance and style in the execution of the integrated guiding information.

REQUIREMENTS

Lillilooloo.com is a fully web-based service and it requires no software to be installed or downloaded to your computer. Browsers supported are IE, Firefox and Chrome.

PRICING

Lillilooloo is completely free to use. The free document sharing platform holds in excess of 60,000 documents and anyone can access the documents for no fee. In the template store Lillilooloo.com charges a flat 2% fee on the gross sales of your documents (e.g.: if you sell a document for $2.00, Lillilooloo.com keeps .04 and you receive $1.96). These are very attractive pricing options.

The research back-office charges per a page of work done and prices differ by the type of work done. Therefore the cost of producing a power point slide from scratch will be different from simply improving an existing slide. That said, the prices are very reasonable and the quality is excellent.

CONCLUSIONS

Lillilooloo.com is definitely filling a much needed gap in the market for high quality support for the business, consulting and MBA markets. Especially in the vertical niche areas, such as management consulting, there is a great need to find resources that can easily speed up your work without forcing you to reinvent the wheel each time.

Lillilooloo.com competes against Scribd, Docstoc and Slideshare well by focusing on the management consulting niche. It has picked a small area and is dominating that area. The release of books like “Succeeding as a Management Consultant” clearly reinforces their authority in this space.

Despite being a fairly young site, Lillilooloo.com has grown its database rapidly and is now branching out into its own content creation. This bodes well for the website. I am not sure how they seeded the website but it seems to have worked very well.

Lillilooloo.com could improve itself by doing the following:

1.       The social elements of the site could be expanded and improved.

2.       The bulk uploader works but takes a few days to appear online.

3.       The Template Store and Books in the store are exceptional quality. They should be made more prominent.

4.       Offer more choices for copyright licences

5.       Improve the search functionality.

What I like about Lillilooloo.com is the following.

1.       It’s picked a management consulting niche and seems to dominate this niche. I have never seen another site offering the services it does and offering them so well.

2.       It does not act like a start-up. There is an offering which is populated with useful material. Users visiting the site gain immediate value.

3.       The template store charges just a 2% administrative fee. That is very low.

4.       The move into fee based Lillilooloo.com generated books like “Succeeding as a Management Consultant” is a great expansion idea.

This site is worth visiting. A new and disruptive innovation.

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Corporate consulting units provide a vital source of knowledge for organizations seeking to increase their innovation capacity by learning about and from their customers. The knowledge created in such consulting business as well as the filters that hinder utilizing this knowledge in the innovation processes of the organization. These corporate consultants are third party experts who influence the decisions of the management team of corporate. With their expertise are able to concentrate on the issue related to corporate in a broader perspective. Due to their experience and knowledge they are able to better analyze an aspect which the top management of the corporate may not able to analyze, because of their being deeply involved in the business. So these corporate consultants weigh the pros and cons of a strategy and situation and give their advice accordingly so that the strategy turns out to be a fruitful one for the corporate. 

Corporate consulting is a process of helping corporate to improve their performance through the analysis of their existing problems and development of future plans. This consulting process involves implementation of best practices in the corporate, coaching skills, implementing latest technology, analytical techniques and strategy development. A consultant being an outsider sees things with completely different aspect and this different perspective of the consultants help them to come with unique solutions or even come up with different strategy for the growth of the corporate. These consultants bring formal methodologies to suggest more effective ways of performing tasks that is healthy for the organizations.   

Corporate consulting services provide necessary advice to help senior management to enhance the effectiveness of the corporate strategy and operation by accessing their business requirements and reviewing their business functions, plans and directions. The corporate consultants comprises of an expert team who hold expertise in conducting a market research in order to empower their clients with a significant competitive advantage. The service of these consultants helps the corporate to strengthen and maintain their position in their respective domain. These consultants are well expert in their work and they can even predict the result of a particular move made by the corporate. Therefore with their advice and help, corporate can confidently grow in their respective area.  

The through professionals involved in corporate consulting also help the top management of the corporate to take crucial business decisions. There are several occasions when one small decision can affect the business to a great extent either in the positive direction or in the negative direction. These consultants provide their advice on their extensive research and collecting relevant data from the authentic source along with demographic and social statistics that will help the management in making crucial decisions. Corporate consulting services can be a huge support for corporate. These consultants help to achieve objectives with an assurance of right decision in every major aspect of the corporate.

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Management consulting jobs might often have a problem that can only be addressed by using the services of a recruitment consultancy. When a company needs the services of a management consultant, it’s having leadership or directional issues of some sort – it needs guidance of a kind that cannot, for whatever reason, come from within the existing corporate structure. That means looking to external sources for management assistance – and that means using a recruitment agency with a tried and tested roster of highly qualified candidates on their books.

Management consultants often don’t need to know the ins and outs of a particular company’s business. What a management consulting candidate needs, in order to be a successful addition to a company’s structure and drive, is a certain set of business applicable skills that may have very little to do with the actual business of any given company. A recruitment consultancy is a perfect example of the ways in which the really successful management consultants often benefit from not having affiliations with a particular industry or type of business. One look at the CV of any successful management consultant will show that he or she moves from industry to industry with the ease of a chamois jumping from crag to crag. Famously, for example, the ex head of the English Football Association moved into a management consultant’s position at the British mail service before taking on the top job at one of the UK’s leading television and broadcasting concerns.

A recruitment consultancy provides candidates for its clients according to their leadership qualities: managerial “behaviour” that sets them apart from the regular crowd. Management consulting jobs require a skill that not many people really have. It’s a skill that is defined more by the results these candidates are able to achieve than by their affiliation with, or knowledge of, a particular industry. In order to turn the fortunes of a major national sporting body around, its now-famous ex head had to display the same behaviours and attitudes he then used on both the national mail service and the country’s first independent television station. It was this attitude, this skill that did the trick.

In order for a company to be sure that it is getting a person who really does have that skill – who can really walk into a board room and shake it up, guide it, help it fulfil the potential it has always had but no one else has been able to clearly see – that company needs to go to a recruitment consultancy. It will know, by default almost, that every candidate a good recruitment agency sends its way will be right for the job – which means it knows it’s onto a winner before it even starts interviewing. The function of a good recruitment agency is to winnow out all but the ideal candidates – so a company that needs a management consulting jobs role filled knows that the role will be filled well, no matter who actually takes the job. The recruitment consultancy is paid to have the eye and the flair to match the right candidate with the right job – and so the wheels of business turn smoothly, no time is lost, and the company gets back on track as painlessly and quickly as possible.

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