Autonomy through mastery

Empowering your team to take ownership of the resulting process and drive it forward, by putting it in practice day in and day out and improving on it when needed is the penultimate step of any management consulting effort. Any company out there that requests some outside help from time to time aims to get just enough guidance to start and bring this effort in-house. This is only the case for economic reasons, as we know management consulting is not cheap, but also from a strategic standpoint, any company that is not self-sustain in the matter of management in long term, will have a hard time operating. Yes, as we said outside help is often needed to complement in-house talent, and for some good reason. But This help should be limited by an end date of the predefined target to allow these inside resources to learn and thrive by tackling all the hard work that comes from dealing with some problems on their own once they are on the right path. Having said that, this opinion while wildly shared by a lot of the people in the management consulting work is rarely acted upon, most of the time we see consulting do all they can to extend their mandate as long as they can, and even part the point where it was logical for them to live the team to do the rest on their own.

We work ourselves out of a job

We at Shems work differently, From the moment we take on a challenge we aim to make the internal team capable of running without us as fast as possible. This does mean we drop off midway and leave the team on their own just for the sake of speed. It means developing a plan where every single detail is mastered by the team and can be implemented without any outside help from day one. It means working hand in hand with the people that are going to be carrying on the work after we leave and preparing them all through this process to be able to take charge once they need to.

Inspect and adapt

Working incrementally and iteratively is not a strange notion for anyone who dabbles in Lean and Agile, But we at Shems take it to another level by using this approach in the development of the process itself. We can measure how much value our new way of working provides the team all through the development process, we are also able to measure how much autonomy the team shows in working with new tools, so always know if what we have built is working and if the team is in the right place to continue the work on there own