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Designing Solutions for Your Business Problems: A Structured Process for Managers and Consultants

Posted on: Thursday, 10 June 2004, 06:00 CDT

Designing Solutions for Your Business Problems: A Structured Process for Managers and Consultants

Betty Vandenbosch (Wiley, San Francisco; 2003; ISBN 0-7879-6765- 3) $45

Designing Solutions proceeds with rigor and thoughtfulness. It introduces a discipline and related tools for improving every consulting projecteven if not all projects permit each of the steps or not all consultants can pull them off-and lucidly lays out useful steps for improving our consulting. Vandenbosch has hit the right balance between theory and practice.

The structured process assumes that good solutions aren't just lightbulbs that flash on but are purposefully designed in a learnable process. You begin by understanding your client's situation, including everything that affects the project and everything that is unchangeable by it; these define the project's boundaries. A stakeholder analysis keeps track of interested individuals and their goals and concerns. After criticizing organization charts, Vandenbosch suggests "rich pictures" as a means of describing a client's situation. Rich pictures depict what is really going on in an organization by using circles to represent people or departments, connected by lines that signify interrelationships.

Next, you agree with your client on the objectives, not merely on the activities to be undertaken or the deliverables. Among the author's suggestions for establishing the objectives: beware of a solution looking for problems; consider only SMART (specific, measurable, agreed to, realistic, and time framed) objectives; work only on something compelling.

Even with a clear objective, you and the client must delimit the scope of the project. An integral part of Vandenbosch's scope description is a summary of constraints and conditions affecting the consultant. A graphic similar to a hierarchical organization chart helps to describe a project's scope, using up to seven topics along with subtopics to be investigated.

Hypotheses, the subject of a chapter, crucially organize and limit data collection to that which is important and useful. A data matrix organizes the data into sources and desired findings that test the hypotheses. For each hypothesis, plan the questions you will ask to test it, your data sources, and the data format (such as interview, observation, document search, or survey).

What follows from the data matrix are work assignments for individual members of the consultant team. Armed with hypotheses and a data matrix, you develop a detailed plan of the problem-solving effort and create a logic diagram, which is the core of the problem- solving process. A logic diagram shows the connections among the gathered data, the findings from the data, conclusions based on the findings, and the solution you recommend based on the conclusions. A conclusion is a diagnostic statement, based on the data and findings, that explains problems or opportunities significant enough to warrant action. Vandenbosch reminds us that it is just as important to discard data as it is to search for data.

The sooner you determine which data are important, the sooner you will reach conclusions and be able to design and implement solutions. Develop a list of questions for each hypothesis, then accept it or reject it based on the evidence. Even before collecting data, Vandenbosch exhorts consultants to put together a "storyboard" or mockup of the report pages you might use to support your hypotheses.

Vandenbosch wants to impress upon consultants that a solution is valuable only if you can explain why you're recommending it and that conelusions are much more valuable if they are based on facts. Data do not have to be quantitative to be convincing. Behaviors and opinions are just as important as numbers. Findings are linked to solutions by means of a logic diagram, in which aggregated data result in findings, pooled findings result in conclusions, and conclusions underlie solutions.

Vandenbosch stresses the importance of developing alternative solutions to a problem. Your first idea for a solution is rarely your best, and she devotes a chapter to devising plausible options and selecting among them. Push yourself to develop the next best way to reach the objective, then test the plausibility of the solutions and gauge their unintended negative consequences. Her preferred tool, from Kepner-Tregoe, develops criteria against which to score the alternative solutions, coupled with weighing the relative importance of the criteria themselves. The best way to separate design of solutions and choosing among them is to have different people undertake each task, with the most obvious criteria for evaluating options being time, cost, quality, and risk.

Aside from the process of developing lact-based solutions, Vandenbosch includes useful chapters on building relationships, nurturing commitment, and driving execution. The CD-ROM that accompanies the book contains a case study, the process checklist, and copies of forms and templates.

Vandenbosch teaches at Case Western Reserve University and draws on several years of consulting. Designing Solutions is the best book this reviewer has read recently on the actual how-to's of consulting. It elegantly, concisely, and persuasively shows consultants how to more effectively structure their problem solving.

Rees Morrison CMC (rwmorrison@ hildebrandt.com) has been consulting with law departments for 15 years to help them manage themselves and their outside counsel better. A former practicing lawyer and the author of six books, he is a Director of Hildebrandt International based in Somerset, New Jersey.

Copyright Journal of Management Consulting, Inc. Jun 2004

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