Consultant Support to embrace Agile Mindset

Consultant support needs to embrace an agile mindset to deliver better work

Consulting needs to deliver more than just paper solutions, recommendations and reports that sit unread once the consultant leaves. Consultants today have the potential to deliver real products and services, in a live environment, as quickly as possible.

The best way to make this happen is to adopt an agile process - this way, learnings are taken out of the prototype work and fed back into the strategy, allowing it to develop and flex based on results. Digital strategy implemented in an agile framework is informed by the testing and learning taken from the previous iteration. This iterative approach to strategy, allows us to harness the power of new developments in the rapidly-changing world we find ourselves in. A two-year digital strategy that cannot adapt to the innovations of next year’s mobile handset technologies is useless from the beginning. This understanding starts from studying a client’s business and being able to identify where digital can offer measurable improvements. These improvements are far beyond just communication; it can easily impact on logistics, supply chain management, internal communications, product design and service delivery, R&D and recruitment. As an industry, we should be defining business problems and then offering digital answers to these problems at a CEO level.

Furthermore, our notion of KPIs and measuring effectiveness needs to change. We cannot prove business effectiveness by measuring digital numbers. We need to move beyond just measuring site visitors or dwell time to an understanding of what these metrics actually mean to a business. How does deeper digital interaction translate to additional sales, increased loyalty or positive word of mouth? Where is the potential in leveraging a digital solution to drive business strategies? Bluntly, what is the ‘so what’ of all the metrics we are collecting? The definition of creativity has to change too. Creativity as a business tool is no longer about just words and pictures, advertisements and campaigns. We have to see creativity as being at the center of a digital strategy, bringing together a consultant’s strategic ability, a traditional agency’s approach to copy and art direction, and a system integrator’s skill with technology. It is through this multi-disciplinary creative approach, through the interplay of these three disciplines, that we can truly forge success in digital business.

The world we are working in is getting ever more complex. One-size-fits-all solutions are no longer suitable, and a single closed ecosystem can never deliver everything a client needs. Website design and rollout can be outsourced cheaply to skilled technicians abroad or powerful website builders online. Simultaneously, it has become abundantly clear that ‘digital’ is much more than just an IT tool or a channel for marketing.

We must acknowledge that change is the only constant, that creativity is a fundamental part of the consulting process, and it joins up strategic planning with digital execution. ‘Digital’, therefore, is really shorthand for explaining how the rapid advancement of technology fundamentally transforms business landscapes. These days, digital technologies impact every part of the enterprise, and for a digital agency, understanding this core imperative will be the foundation for successful project delivery.