Level of Goodness?

Well to put this story into context I have to explain my travel woes from Monday morning. However because half of my travel is not smooth I will not dwell on the issue as I think I have complained enough in my blog. Well I new I was probably in trouble from the start. With 12 inches of wet heavy snow the night before, I did not see the cab waiting for me out front as I expected at 4:30a. Well as I had requested early because of the snow the night before I was pretty calm. When it had not showed up by 4:45 I was a little worried. So I called my car service. They told me they were running 30 min behind. Well I pretty much knew then I was screwed; they showed up at 5:20a and my flight was at 6:00a.

To sum up the day, I missed my 1^st flight by 10 minutes. Actually they shut the doors early because they released the seats (I found out later from someone who was on the flight) to a lot – say 15 or more – NWA employee’s. I made it before the scheduled push back, but they had already locked up. So I was put on standby – in a middle seat mind you – for the 6:50a flight. Well I got on. But it had not been through it’s safety inspection so it pushed back 25 minutes late and by that time they closed the airport due to heavy snow (we would have made it if the plane was ready on time strike two for NWA that day). So I sat in a middle seat for 2 hours waiting…. Waiting…

After an hour they had let people get off of the plane. Unfortunately, when the snow stopped snowing only a third of us were still on the plane. Instead of taking off NWA decided to back fill the seats with people from canceled flights. It took 40 minutes to reboard the plane. By that time the snow started again and we had to wait again. NWA let people off the plane again. 1 and ½ hours later the snow stopped, took another 40 minutes to reboard again, and then got off the ground around 12:30… I was originally on the 6:00a flight. Ok so yadda, yadda I got into Detroit at 2:30, no more flight to Dayton, was rebooked to Columbus, that flight was canceled, the next was delayed, got into Columbus at 9:30p, drove to Dayton, and was finally at the hotel at 11:00p. What a day.

OK, so while I was stuck in the Detroit airport I ran into another consultant from my local office. He had actually been stuck on the same flight and after talking briefly about our travel woes we started talking about the various projects we were on. Two interesting points cam out of this conversation from his assignments. The first was his last role, after being in consulting for more than a decade he actually was on a project in which the role was to reduce head count. This work sounded similar to that of the consultants in Office Space. Can anyone say ‘So what is it that you actually do here?’ He mentioned how hard it was to work with the very people you were sent in to eliminate and how hostile they could be. There is a surprise the people you want to fire have no interest in helping you eliminate their jobs! I honestly hope I don’t have to work in that type of environment. From time to time SAP causes reduction in head count but that is not the goal of putting in the system just one of it’s effects; but if the company wants to grow it is actually helpful because those people can be reassigned to more meaningful tasks rather than being let go.

The second role he was talking about was that of working on an S&O assignment. S&O stands for Strategy and Operations. This is a non-technical, business strategy role in which our company gives advice on policy, company direction, and so on. This consultant I was talking to normally works on technical projects so this was something new for him. The funny thing was is he wasn’t really sure how we are judged by clients in this situation. Normally if you implementation goes in on time, on budget, and works the way it was sold to the client you have several metrics to measure success. When you give advice how do you know if you were successful? He wondered if there was a level of goodness for the advice provided. Like that was very good advice it gets a level of 8 or that was poor advice it only gets a level 3. I found this to be an amusing idea.

I believe success is gauged by the outcome. If the company takes your advice and it creates a benefit those benefits can be attributed to you. If they don’t take your advice and fail it could be said they failed because you gave them sound advice and they did not take it. The good news is with strategy work you can always claim the later for failure because the client only gets advice. They don’t get complete plans and the decisions are always let to the client in the end. So no matter what the level of goodness provided by the advice, the firm always gets paid and can claim success. This certainly explains many companies success in Strategy consulting.