Micro Consulting - an emerging trend?

Aug. 2, 2013 - PRLog -- What is Micro Consulting?

Micro Consulting is a fairly new concept whereby Consultants complete small engagements through the “short and sharp” delivery of knowledge, insight and opinion to Customers wanting assistance to achieve business objectives. The unusual characteristic about this new Consulting concept is that the services are usually delivered over the internet after a relationship has been remotely established between the Consultant and the Customer.


Consulting Cloud (http://www.consultingcloud.org) has now released its first range of Micro Consulting service packages (http://www.consultingcloud.org/micro_consulting) covering Business Case Review, Service Catalog assessment, IT Project Health check, Cloud Server setup and configuration, and hardware and software maintenanc audit.

What is the perceived need for such a service?
In the today’s dynamic and unpredictable business world, where there are significant pressures to simultaneously reduce costs and increase efficiencies, many organizations cannot afford, or have the time and resources, to engage large Consulting firms in lengthy and potentially disruptive assignments that have a high cost and risk to the business.

Where skills are not available in-house to achieve the desired objectives, many modern and agile organizations are now looking at innovative ways to access the required expertise externally with minimum cost and risk and with a potentially higher benefit. In many cases these organizations (for example) might just be looking for assistance with getting started with a project or initiative or require knowledge and experience to solve a business or technical problem. This is where Micro Consulting fits in.

Obviously, as with any Consulting assignment, there needs to be trust and rapport established between the Customer and the Consultant. With the pervasiveness and mobility of communications these days, there is really no need for face-to-face meetings in most cases. The Customer/Consultant relationship can be established over the internet, saving time, office space and significantly reducing the cost of the engagement.

Micro Consulting is of greatest benefit where the assignment can be broken down into small and discreet “chunks” of work, so that the Consultant can slowly build credibility with the Customer as well as gradually broadening their knowledge about the Customer’s business and objectives.

Below are just a few examples of assignments where Micro Consulting might work well : (all the examples are Information Technology related)

 Reviewing an Outsourcing Contract and Service Levels and recommending changes
 Reviewing a Project Plan
 Reviewing Project Risk
 Discussing and recommending a project intervention strategy when a project is in trouble
 Reviewing a Data Migration Plan
 Assisting with the development of an Information Technology Strategy

The delivery model for Micro Consulting is not much different than face-to-face Consulting except it is performed remotely. Obviously with any Consulting assignment there will be some introductory and background discussion to be undertaken between the Consultant and the Customer. This would typically be performed at no cost, using tools available on the Consultant’s website, Skype, email, instant messaging etc.

A cost estimate would be established and once approved, the work would begin. Due to the fact that there is very little overhead for the Consultant and the assignments are typically small in size, the Consultant rates can be significantly less than market rates.

The near future
Micro Consulting seems to be the next stage of the evolution of unpaid advice and guidance through communities such as LinkedIn. These platforms will most likely remain as a means to network and maintain professional credibility by keeping everyone up to date with skills, experience and current position.

Some emerging sites like Maven have decided on a “private” model where the identity of all parties working together is not known. This might work for the “commodity” services like application development etc., but for anyone that has ever used a Consultant you will know that the Customer must be aware of the background, experience and professional profile of the person that they are entrusting their business information to. This leads us to favor an open and transparent Micro Consulting model as a critical success factor for this type of service in the future.

Micro Consulting already has some resonance in the field of Medicine where medical problems can be diagnosed online for a fee. We believe that it will expand into other professional areas such as Information Technology and Business Consulting as the majority of people across the world get more and more connected.