Change management often requires bringing on additional skills to complete a temporary piece of work. So how can you access the bespoke knowledge you need without making full-time hires?
This blog post intends to outline three of your best options with their pros and cons and to leave the decision-making up to you.
We want to give you an unbiased overview of utilising Outcome Based On-Demand Teams, Contingent Labour, and one of the Big Consultancies for your change management needs.
Pros of Outcome Based, On-Demand Teams
- Fixed price, outcome-based model
- Access to an extensive network of high calibre consultants that have been vetted and qualified through Rullion’s recruitment arm
- Responsible for selecting, onboarding and managing the right resource on your behalf, from one person to an entire team
- Access to an extended non-permanent workforce that you can lean on whenever you need additional services, meaning fewer overheads, more significant cost savings and more competitive pricing
- Complete visibility through tech platforms, integration into your internal processes and mirroring your governance
- Your teams retain intellectual property and can sustain the change
- Service Delivery Managers embed into your organisation and scale teams up (and down) as per your project’s needs
- Customer knowledge retained so that you can draw upon it in future where needed
- Product / Vendor agnostic
- More cost-effective than big consultancies.
Cons of Outcome Based, On-Demand Teams
- Needs a clear and defined outcome to work optimally
- Requires a behavioural change if you have traditionally used contract labour
- You cannot direct and control what people do day-to-day
- You cannot run and supervise Rullion Change Delivery teams the way you have done with contingent labour teams in the past
- You need to adapt to Rullion Change Delivery working practices, review cadence and approach to RAID management and change control
- If you don’t consider hidden costs, it can appear more expensive than contingent labour.
Pros of Contingent Labour
- You don’t need to define an actual outcome
- You don't need to have clarity on what you want or need
- You can supervise, control, and manage your contingent workers day-to-day and do not have to relinquish that control to a third-party provider
- Ideal for covering Business as Usual (BAU) tasks, such as sick leave or maternity leave
- Ideal for specific task-related roles as opposed to project-based roles
- Ideal if you cannot attribute a timeline, milestone or an outcome to a task
- Most cost-efficient option with the lowest markup if procuring through an MSP.
Cons of Contingent Labour
- A lot of time and effort is spent on identifying the right person/s, including reviewing CVs and interviewing
- A lot of time and effort is spent on performance management and feedback
- It can be costly to change/swap contingent labour if it’s not the right fit or if a requirement changes mid-project
- A lot of time and effort is spent giving pastoral care, direction, and support
- By nature, contingent labour is not incentivised to finish the job early; they benefit from delays and overrun.
Pros of Big Consultancies
- Diverse service portfolios
- Responsible for selecting, onboarding, and managing the right resource on your behalf, from one person to an entire team
- Can provide advisory services and high-level strategic direction and design
- Can give you a plethora of external insight
- Their scales typically mean they can give good competitor insight
- Can provide an accurate outside-in view of things
- You can supervise and direct resources as the provider employs them.
Cons of Big Consultancies
- Most costly option with the highest markup
- Availability is often treated as a skillset
- Often “pitch with the A-Team and deliver with the B-Team”
- Tendency to use land and expand tactics, upselling and cross-selling throughout your organisation
- Typically not product agnostic and can be seen to promote their partners
- Tendency to bring in more resources to fix problems they have identified
- Do things their way and don’t mirror your methodologies
- Culturally, typically, there is a divide in how they behave compared to your people – creating separation rather than unity.
The option you select is often determined by how much external insight/advice you feel you need, how much the need has been defined, and how much control you are comfortable sharing with the provider. Ultimately, there is a place for all three models, and we continue to see that the most successful programmes tend to involve a blend of each.
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