Using external advisors: Outside knowledge combined with tribal knowledge

“It is unrealistic that any organisation, regardless of size, can have all the expertise they require in constant employ. Sometimes you need expertise or advice that is a little bit niche, or maybe you only need it for a short amount of time. It is just that you don’t want people like me running your projects or even worse, deciding which projects you should be undertaking . People like me need to answer to someone on the inside who gets the business, understands its objectives, can influence the right people and ultimately make sure that the digital projects that get delivered are the ones that the business needs.”
Simon Waller.

Interesting (and accurate) concept from Simon Waller above. Having been an independent external advisor for over a decade, it’s been clear that the customers that have been the most involved in a project have also been the most excited about the results. It tends to stem from a combination of a different set of ideas (external advisor) joining a tribal knowledge of the organisation (internal resources).

The same is true of off-the-shelf implementation projects. It’s important to engineer a meeting of the minds:

• The customer / client has all of the local, tribal knowledge about their organisation – this includes systems, technologies, integrations, processes, people, politics, empires, etc.
• The vendor / supplier / advisor has an outside perspective – which often includes a broad industry awareness, trends, alternative approaches, industry benchmarks, product knowledge, vendor capabilities, etc

The mode of business is changing, the speed of change is increasing and more people are turning to freelance expertise (from the supply and demand side of the equation). Hence, it makes sense to me that organisations need specialist resources on the inside to get the most out of resources on the outside.

As Simon says, “someone on the inside who gets the business, understands its objectives, can influence the right people and ultimately make sure that the digital projects that get delivered are the ones that the business needs.”

The comms industry is evolving so rapidly that it will need to call on external advisors even more in the future. Does your organisation have the structure, workforce and culture to make best use of them (us)?

An interesting aside is that it’s important to find the right vendors / suppliers / advisors. Some have a tendency to believe that just because they are being brought in to provide expert advice that they already know everything. They don’t. They’ll never have your all-important tribal knowledge that is essential to getting projects implemented.

The part I like most about the animation above is that as the partnership gets stronger, the mutual knowledge becomes greater and the value increases. As the advisor learns more about the customer, their advice becomes more valuable because it has greater contextual awareness. As the client learns more about the advisor’s approach or the vendor’s solutions, they become more valuable because they better understand how it can be used or implemented.