Stories from our work · 4 min read
The hours that mattered
Ask any experienced consultant where their week goes, and somewhere in the answer is a block of hours they wish they had back. The work matters. It has to be done, and done well. But it does not really need them.
Field Advisors · Smart technology · Consulting · Capacity
For one consulting firm in Africa, those hours had become a real problem.
The firm advises clients in a very large, complex and high-risk industry. In that kind of world, what clients pay for is judgement: experienced people who can read a difficult situation and give advice that holds up when the stakes are high. That judgement is the firm's most valuable asset, and there is only so much of it to go round.
A specific part of the consultants' work was eating into it. It called for a very particular set of capabilities. It added value for clients. And it was taking up far too much of the consultants' time.
A better answer
When experts are stretched, the usual answers are to work longer or to push the work onto someone more junior. Neither is a good fit when the work still needs real skill and the industry leaves little room for error.
The firm wanted another way to take the burden off its consultants without letting the quality slip. That is where we came in.
Building for one job
We started by being precise. Rather than looking for smart technology to "help" the consultants in a general way, we focused on that one clearly defined part of their work.
Then we built Field Advisors around it.
Field Advisors are not general-purpose chat tools, and they are not stand-ins for the consultants themselves. Each one is designed for a narrow job, with the specific capabilities that job requires. Here, that meant shaping them around the firm's own work and the real demands of its clients' industry.
We trained the Field Advisors for that work, then deployed them into the business.
What happened next
The Field Advisors now carry that part of the work. The consultants are no longer tied up in it, so their hours go back to the advice that depends on their own experience and judgement, which is the reason clients come to them in the first place.
Why we tell this one
Smart technology tends to be talked about in grand terms. In our experience, it is most useful when it takes on one specific, well-understood job, so that experienced people have more time for the work only they can do.