What Do Process Consultants Do?

The first thing you're going to need to do, we will at some point get you to find your first client. Now your first client, we call them a case study client. To get certified, we'll get you to actually work with two case study clients that you submit through to head office. We give you some feedback and have a little bit of a look. And at the end of those case studies you become a certified systemologist. You can still go out now while you're going through the training and introduce yourself as a systemologist. But you don't become a certified systemologist until you've actually submitted your two case studies. So we'll talk about some ideas on how to find that first client. The sooner you can sort of get that rolling, once we get through the core part of the training, the better, which is probably going to be around that, I would imagine week number eight, somewhere around there we will have got through the core part of the training. And that's maybe when you'll think about starting with your first case study client. But you might want to plant some seeds before that. And we'll talk about some ideas on how you might plant seeds. Maybe you buy a bunch of systemology books and people that you think might be a good fit, you just start handing them out as gifts and saying, hey, I'm going through the certification. I read the book, thought it'd be perfect for you. Do you want to have a read? And then I'd love to chat with you about it. Once you've had a bit of a go through, just start to plant some seeds. It'll make it easier for you a little bit further down the track, particularly if you don't have existing clients and you're thinking about starting off with a new client. So you'll find that first client. As James suggested. I'm going to suggest that you pick a familiar industry, whether it's a trades based business or maybe you're in manufacturing or maybe you know, finance or legal or whatever it may be. Pick something that you're familiar with. Early on you'll try and in that business identify a systems champion or someone that you can align yourself with generally who's not the business owner because the business owner is super, super busy. And ideally, if you can find someone inside the organization who will be a bit of a connector piece for you, connecting you with the right team members, following people up. They might even join with you on the extraction calls because they may either continue to hold the flag after your three month engagement or you might continue to work with Them if you work with the business beyond that three month engagement. But it's all about, we're looking at making lasting, permanent change. So we don't want to be the consultant who comes in, creates a bunch of systems, puts them into a folder, walks out the door and then everybody forgot three months later what the consultant actually did. We want to try and figure out who in the business is going to continue to drive this forward because it's about building and changing culture. So that's why I was a little bit excited I think. Yeah. When we were talking about some organizational change earlier. And we'll lean on some of the group to talk about some of the insights for organizational change because that's, that's what you're there to do. Once you find that person, you'll map out the critical client flow. You use this as a way to very clearly define the deliverables on what you're going to work on with the client. We transfer that into what we call the systems assigned sheet. There's another drtc but this systems are not assigned sheet which you'll do within the first few weeks of working with a client. Get super clear on here's what I am going to do within their first few months or this engagement. A lot of consultants get this piece wrong, especially some of the consultants because we've had people who are already doing systems based work and are a systems consultant come through the systemology certification. And one of their huge things that they always say that they love to learn about Systemology is how we tighten the scope. Otherwise it becomes the song that never ends. The scope creep comes in, oh, can you do this system as well? Oh, we mentioned that system. Oh, I just realized that there's this whole set of systems that sit underneath this bigger system. So we have to learn about how do we capture, define and when it falls outside of scope, how we address that and make sure that we set up for ongoing work. So we'll talk a little bit about that. You'll then meet with the client and there we go. Yeah, you'll meet with the client typically via Zoom. You'll get the knowledgeable person to share how they're doing, what they're doing. You'll ask questions, you'll extract it over that call and then in between sessions with the client, you then take those recordings and convert them into having some clear documentation along with the notes. And that's the ultimately the deliverable. That's what the business owner is going to see at the end. So we need to make sure that they're produced to a certain standard, that they're helpful and useful, that we're creating systems, not for the sake of just creating systems. We conscious that someone is going to look at these and someone will use them and we want them to be helpful and useful. And that's what it is that the business owner is looking for help to do. And we'll teach them how we do this process. They might try to internalise this or they might continue to work with you on an ongoing basis as you start to work around the different departments. But first off, you just focusing on doing the critical client flow for the client.