Interim Managers or Consultants: It's your choice

During a change initiative you are facing different types of challenges within your organisation which require different types of solutions. If you require external help, a consultancy will offer you consultants, while a recruitment agency will offer you interim managers (or contractors, the line between the two being blurred).
iProCon offers you a choice to provide you with the best solution for your circumstances and the tasks ahead.

Consultants

If you want your own employees to do the bulk of the work, but need some extra expertise, facilitation, or an outside perspective to bring in fresh ideas, our consultants will help you through the process. This can be anything from a one day workshop to a project of more than a year, but it will rarely be full time over a longer period. The important feature of a consultant intervention is that it leverages your internal resources to put them into a position to do a better job even after the consultants have left. It is not unusual for a consultant to have worked with 100 or more different organisations after 10 years in the job. This gives them a very broad range of experience and makes them quick to analyse a problem and work effectively within a new context. Of course there may be cases of nearly full-time usage of consultants, typically when there is a broad analysis to do or if they work with various units across your organisation, but they won't work in a single position as if replacing an employee for a longer period.

Interim Managers

This is where interim personnel come in. If you have a position to fill, but don't want to hire somebody on an employment contract (or need someone to start quickly whilst searching for the full-time person), you are looking for an interim manager. The reason can be that the position is only needed for a limited time or you need someone with a particular profile for a certain project. Typical examples could be a turnaround initiative, an M&A situation, the build up of a new business unit, a culture change programme, or any other major project or period of change.
Interim engagements are usually full-time (for any period between 6 and 24 months) and therefore take a lower day rate. While interim managers do not see as many different organisations as consultants, they still can draw on a broader experience than the average employee and are usually comfortable to settle in a new context quite fast.

Your Choice

iProCon offers both options and are also happy to help you decide what's the best for you. In fact, they often go together quite well: e.g. a consultant's intervention may help you to analyse a challenge and define the roadmap for the change required, but then you may lack the resources to follow through and need one or more full time people for a few months to run the project. In this case we'll find you the right interim managers to do the job.

Two Examples

To show you what our consultants and interim managers can achieve, here is an example for each:

How one of our interim managers helps an international high tech company to build their own IT after a demerger

The client is a well known international high tech company. After a demerger they had to separate their IT from the former owner, build much of it on a green field and move data and knowledge across. They needed one person to manage the creation of their administrative IT (most notably accounting and HR).
iProCon provided an experienced change manager with an excellent rack record in international change projects and IT management. He took over the following tasks for a nine month period to lead the client through the change and then hand over to internal employees:

Program managing the migration and implementation projects
Change & communication
Architecture design
Driving software and provider selection
Contract negotiations
Helping with hiring of further staff
Managing a team of technical consultants, interims and employees
Managing the interface between the IT, HR, and finance functions
Reporting to the CIO and helping him with decision making

How one of our consultants helped a Yorkshire based manufacturing company to improve performance by getting the whole workforce working towards strategic goals and gaining silver accreditation from Investors in People at the same time

The client is a medium sized manufacturing company. After several years of strong growth top management felt that the company didn't perform as well as it should, and suspected the issue had something to do with the organisation's structure and the way people were managed.
They asked an iProCon consultant to help them identify the opportunities for improvement and after a two day workshop and a brief analysis they defined together the following fields to work on:

Communication between management and the workforce as well as between functional and geographical silos
Feedback culture
Job descriptions (understanding what is expected from me and how I contribute to the success of the company)
Performance management and reviews
KPIs (key performance indicators) for reporting

The mission was to create one reality for the whole organisation so that everybody clearly understood how they contributed to the creation of value that the customer was willing to pay for, what was expected of them, and how their actions enabled others in the organisation to be successful.
During the 5 month intervention the iProCon consultant spent less than 40 days with the client:

Defining the objectives of the project in more detail
Defining the roadmap
Setting up and running communications with all staff to create the change agenda
Coaching top management as well as line managers to achieve deliverables
Reviewing the outcomes and providing ongoing help where necessary
Setting the company up for the ongoing journey to further improvement

So rather than having an external person on site for the full 5 months, it took just a third of that time following a genuine consulting approach and leveraging the internal resources.