Extract Value from Consultants: How to Hire, Control, and Fire Them

Make the Right Choices about the Consultants you Hire and manage them well, and you will potentially create immeasurable business value. Select the wrong consulting firm or neglect to manage them effectively, and business value will elude you.

Extract Value from Consultants will show you how, depending on consulting spend, your organization can realize benefits in the order of thousands to multi-millions of dollars from three sources:

1. Increased strategic and operational benefits from projects-arising from more rigorous selection and management of consultants;

2. Reduced consulting spend-by being better equipped for contract negotiations and configuring more cost-effective project teams; and

3. Improved internal knowledge and capabilities-through more purposeful collaboration between your scarf and the consultants.

Extract greater value for your organization, and personally reap the rewards, when you next utilize consultants on a project.

Over more than two decades, Gordon Perchthold and Jenny Sutton each worked, initially, for technology companies, and then for global management consulting firms. They progressed from senior consultants, through the manager and senior manager ranks (including, for Gordon, a sabbatical at Accenture), to become partners in Deloitte Consulting, and eventually managing partners of International Client Service at ABeam Consulting in Tokyo (formerly Deloitte's Japan practice).

In 2006, Gordon and Jenny established The RFP Company. Without the inherent constraints of a traditional consulting firm, they are able to apply a unique consulting approach to assist their clients to structure and extract value from complex business initiatives-which occasionally entails the involvement of large consulting firms.

Over their careers, their assignments have take them to Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Sydney, London, Zurich, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and a dozen other cities.