7. Presentation with Defined Next Steps 

  Once you have sorted through all of the information you gathered and developed your presentation, it is time to present it. If you have followed my recommendation about validating your work with the client, then there should be no surprises. I recommend you review your presentation with the client first; a sort of “dry run.” In that way, any minor adjustments that are required can be made before the actual presentation is made. 

I also suggest that once the client’s initial review is completed, they be allowed to determine the audience for the presentation of the findings and the recommendations. Having made numerous presentations of this sort, I have found that each client has a different approach. Some want only their staff to hear the presentation first, with later presentations to a larger and often more mixed audience. Others want exactly the opposite. Of course, you can recommend the audience; to this end, I recommend that you start with the client’s staff. Through successive meetings with larger audiences, the information can be disseminated. This approach gives the leadership team a chance to digest the material and buy into the steps to make the change before the information is presented to others. 

There is also another reason for meeting with the client before the presentation. It gives them the background information they need to support the next steps. At the actual presentation, a preview meeting with the client enables them to show an understanding of the material as it is presented. It lets them develop some leading questions that will help you and the organization move forward with the recommended next steps. They can show their involvement and use the meeting forum to get others involved. 

Things to remember for your presentation include: 

a. Make copies of the presentation for the group using the PowerPoint notes format. However, do not give out the material until the end of the presentation. If you give it out beforehand, people will be reading it and not paying attention to what you have to say. 

b. Use a projector to show your slide presentation. Often people will hand out the slide presentation and talk the group through it without projecting it. This is very ineffective. 

c. Stand up when you present the material. In this way people will be forced to focus on you and hopefully on what you have to say. 

d. Stay on track both for the content and the time. You will have so much information that it would be easy to spend hours discussing it. Stay focused or risk losing the group. 

e. Don’t get defensive if challenged. State your facts. If some one disagrees, ask the audience whether they feel the information is valid. If they won’t acknowledge the facts you are presenting, then they most likely will not support the associated change. 

f. Talk to the group, but focus on the client. If the client (usually the senior manager) acknowledges your findings, the rest of the group probably will too, at least overtly (see Chapter 9 on resistance). 

g. Based on the structure of the findings from Figure 8-2, you may have to teach soft skills and the organizational culture. Very few maintenance and reliability people are familiar with these concepts because their normal focus is on hard skills. 

h. Set up the presentation for mid-morning. If you serve any refreshments, don’t serve coffee cake or anything with sugar. The mid-morning time slot works well. People have had a chance to get their daily activities started and they are still fresh. Luncheon meetings are distracting and the after noon meetings are when people get tired or when they are thinking about the end of the day issues and deadlines. 

i. The issue of food is also important. Cakes and other snacks with high sugar content gives people a sugar rush, but as this wears off, they become sluggish. If you feed people snacks with high sugar content, you risk losing your audi ence at the end of the presentation when you need their participation the most. Typically in presentations of this sort the most I provide is coffee and tea. 

j. Have someone you trust act as the scribe and take notes during the presentation. Having someone else perform this task frees you up to make the presentation and lead the discussion of the next steps. Doing both well is virtually impossible.

The last thing about presenting your findings and recommendations is to make certain that you discuss and end the meeting with defined next steps, along with named responsibilities and completion dates. If possible, don’t end the meeting without accomplishing these tasks. You may not get an opportunity to assemble the group focused on change-related initiatives again. Without next steps, you will delay the effort; at worst you may kill it.  

8. Agreement—Locking It Down Following your presentation and agreement on next steps, you need to publish the presentation minutes and agreements. Don’t wait! Do this work within one day of the meeting; otherwise, people will forget what they agreed to do. Also use these notes as a validation point with your client. What you want to validate is the client’s understanding of the agreements that were made, responsibilities, the timeline for accomplishing the work, and your role in the overall effort. At this point, you have reached a major milestone and are ready to move into the execution phase.  

9. Execution The execution phase of the work begins when you complete your presentation and reach agreement on the next steps, as well as when you finalize your role as the internal consultant on the upcoming effort. Execution ends partially with deployment. However, because we are dealing with a process change, there really is no end for the site personnel. 

For you, the internal consulting part of the work effort ends with your disengagement. There is also an audit phase in which you may become involved. This is one advantage internal consultants have over their external counterparts. They remain on site even after they disengage; they can get re-engaged to help with the audit of the process after it has been in effect for a pre-determined period of time. There is also the possibility that you will have enabled the site personnel so that they will do the audit themselves and only call on you for advice. 

 Working through the work redesign process will be covered in Chapter 11 on teams. There are two other critical parts of the work: readiness for change and sustainability. These will be covered in Chapter 15.  

10. Disengagement As an internal consultant, you will have the opportunity to work on many site-wide or even company-wide initiatives. One thing that we discussed early in this book was the need for site ownership of the initiative throughout its entire life cycle. If you own it, failure of the initiative will be the ultimate outcome. In addition, you might as well sign on as a part of the organization because you will never be able to leave. 

A disengagement strategy should begin as soon as you are assigned to work as an internal consultant on the initiative. At the outset, you need to make sure that there is an owner, a site initiative lead, and a project team. The last of these, the team, includes you filling some, if not all, of the internal consultant roles described in Chapter 10. The owner or lead role should never be yours. Otherwise, the ownership you need to disengage will be lacking. 

As the effort proceeds, you need to make sure that you do not ever become the owner or leader. This is a self-monitoring process that works on two levels. 

a. You need to make sure that the designated leads do not abdicate their responsibilities to you. Many initiative leaders will try because they have “more important” things to do; they see you as someone to whom they can delegate tasks. 

b. You also need to make sure that you don’t try to take over. By the very nature of their jobs, internal consultant types are self-motivated and “can do” type people. As a result, if they see a leader floundering, they will jump in and take over. In many cases, the leader may allow it. Site ownership is then transferred and the ability to disengage is lost.

Assuming that you have set up the parameters of disengagement, there should not be much of a problem turning the last few aspects of the work over to the site. This should be a formal process with an established turnover date so that what is taking place— your exit—is clear to all. 

Signs to look for that indicate that your exit is causing a problem are as follows: 

a. Signs of fear and disorganization in the team 

b. The effort stalls without your involvement 

c. Continuous calls and e-mails for help 

d. Calls from the client with expressed concerns 

e. Action item dates not being met

f. People reverting to the old way of working 

g. Personal feelings of discomfort when you talk to people about the initiative and the progress it is making 

h. Other forms of resistance (see Chapter 9)

If many of these signs are prevalent, then you have not successfully disengaged and you need to find out why and take the necessary corrective action. This might even mean re-engaging to determine the root causes of the problem and fixing them.

11. Audit

Change is a continuous process. It is not a project that you and, more specifically, the site team can complete and then walk away. For this reason it needs to be monitored. Problems should be identified as they appear and corrective action taken to bring them back into alignment with the overall goals.  

If they truly have ownership of the work, then this is a site effort. However, as an internal consultant you can support it or, if necessary, even lead the effort. It is almost the same as the information gathering process. The difference now is that you are identifying gaps between the vision and the current state of the work initiative, not the former “as is” work process. Periodic audits are extremely important because they alert you about process problems which can then be addressed before they gat to the point that they can not be corrected.

Figure 8-1 The Internal Consultant Work Process

The eleven steps described in this chapter can be represented by the diagram shown in Figure 8-1. The series of blocks on the left are those steps required to gather the information, make the analysis, and prepare you for the presentation of findings. The blocks on the right are the steps that follow the presentation. I have shown the presentation block in the center because it is the central task of the entire process. 

As you can see, the internal consultant work process can be rather complex and time consuming if it is done correctly. It is clearly not a part-time job for anyone. Consequently, there is a need for experienced, well-trained internal consultants. If this is not possible, then external consultants must be hired to handle the work correctly. 

Five Things to Think About or Do

  1. List the eleven steps of the work process and identify which ones you have used in the work that you have done. Why did you not use the others?   2. Identify which steps worked well and which ones caused you problems. Try to identify why the problems existed and what you might do differently next time.   3. How have you clarified internal consultant work assignments and your role in these assignments in the past? How would you go about it in the future? Prepare an outline of how you would approach this task. 

4. Review the presentation task. How have you done presentations in the past? Would you do anything differently the next time you had to make a presentation? What would it be? 

5. Think about an initiative in which you were involved that did not succeed. Was it audited before it was declared a fail ure? If it was audited, what was discovered and what was done to try to keep the effort from failing? If it wasn’t audited, would an audit have helped save it from failure?