Tuesday 10 August 2010

Would you organise hundreds of consultancy interveiws yourself?

If you had nothing better to do or love admin and typing, then you might be tempted to organise your own interviews and type your own notes. But, this isn't the best way to be successful and make money as a management consultant.

Faced with the prospect of organising 200 meetings across 13 authority areas for a local government project, a consultancy firm turned to Virtual Assistants for the first time, and became a new Office Lifeline client.  They found the cost insignificant compared to the project value and their own day rates, which made it an easy decision, and engaging people who understand the consultancy world reduced the risk of working with someone new.

The service provided involved VAs supporting individual consultants, calling clients to booking interviews, sending information and dealing with queries and schedule changes. After an interview, the consultants dictated their notes and sent them to their VA who typed them for the next day. Our in-house technical support also helped the client resolve some of their own IT problems during the project.

The project was managed in a dedicated WebOffice. All project information was maintained in one place - information security was important for the client because of the sensitivity of the subject matter - and accessible by everyone involved, from anywhere, irrespective of the operating system a consultant was using.

Behind the scenes, all project contacts were imported into the Contact Manager. This was used to track interviews, hold the directions and location maps and produce Booking Lists, Interview Schedules and other reports. The consultants either used their WebOffice Calendar or synchronised that with their Microsoft Outlook Calendar on their laptop - for some, notification reminders were used too. All raw audio files and typed notes were held in the Document Store.

For the consultants, it was definitely a life saver! They had "their Secretary" booking interviews and all they had to do was turn up, do their stuff and dictate their notes. When they needed the notes for analysis, they were easy to find because they were neatly filed away in one place. And, when producing the report and invoices, a list of all the meetings held, booked and cancelled, etc were available at the click of a mouse.

Imagine doing all this yourself, and at your day rate. It would make you uncompetitive at best and insane at worse... or it that the other way round? Anyway, it's got to be the way forward whichever way you look at it.

Look out for the full case study, coming soon.

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