Continuous Flow Consulting: Leverage Technology for Just In Time Consulting

This is the fifth post in a series about moving towards a continuous flow model for providing outside assistance to companies that want to become leaner.

Principle #3 of Continuous Flow Consulting is: "Spend less time in face to face meetings, and do much more over the phone and over the Internet, using the richest media available, on shorter time cycles."

In Lean Manufacturing, one of the big wastes is transportation: the need to ferry raw materials, parts and subassemblies between different parts of a plant to get things done.

In consulting, travel is a huge source of non-value-added time. It costs the consultant hours of productive time, and it directly costs the client money. That doesn't mean that all travel is bad - it does mean that we need to ask ourselves if the travel is worth it.

There are some things that can only be done face to face. In fact, I've blogged before about the unintended side effects of blanket travel restrictions when they occur at critical points in the product development process, and the same thing is true in a consulting engagement.

However, so often we assume that most of the work that we do has to be face to face: that if we're not on the client site, we're not adding maximum value. I would argue the opposite: we can provide more value to more clients if we develop flexible models that blend face-to-face work with continuous access to just-in-time remote coaching.

For example, I cannot be physically in Helsinki, Singapore, Pennsylvania and California on the same day. I can (with some creative scheduling, a good headset and an Internet connection) conduct coaching calls with people in all of these places on the same day. In fact, I can be on-site in California and also give my Finnish, Singaporean, and Philadelphia clients just what they need, when they need it (ironically, this is easier when I'm traveling than when I'm at home).

The technology available today makes this so easy that I don't know why everyone doesn't do it. We can't cover as much in a coaching call as we can in a full day meeting, but it's quality, not quantity that counts. If that call occurs at the right point in time, with just-in-time knowledge sharing, it can have a much greater impact on the success of the project. I'm a lot more likely to hit that moment if I'm talking with my clients on short time cycles.

We used to believe that we needed face-to-face meetings to develop trust - but I'm not sure that was ever as true as it seemed. While face-to-face meetings build relationships between relative strangers, we are more likely to sustain a relationship with a person we talk with by phone once a week than we are with someone that we only see once a month.