The consultancy process challenge

How can you best make the knowledge and experience of individual consultants corporately available?

GreySpace comment

It is critical to the success of any consultancy business that professional service deliverers learn from each other and from the experience that has been accumulated in the organisation. There thus needs to be some means of capturing this experience.
You can spend a lot of time and money developing a knowledge management system, but in our experience we find that developing some standard consultancy procedures based on the experience of practitioners in the business is the most powerful way of starting to leverage existing expertise.

Case example

We worked with an international consultancy practice that was entering a new area of consultancy activity. Only a few consultants had any experience of this but the intention was that all consultants would eventually engage in the new way of working.
We formed project teams with the consultants themselves to:
Identify the critical procedures
Define the best practice for carrying them out
Capture the experience and make it corporately available through their intranet
Ensure that the systems were user friendly and that the processes were taken up and adding value to the work of the consultants.