Carragee Consulting

This Atlantic article about how flimsy Musk’s deal-break lawsuit is made me think: Defense lawyers must get awful clients a lot of the time but other industries, like consulting, face similar issues.

In strategy consulting here are some red flags I’ve seen in RFP cycles that could mean a project will be miserable to attempt to deliver value:

– unclear problem statement (scope and measures of success too nebulous)

– too short of time between RFP and proposal deadline (expect a copy paste solution from previous project)

– limited access to key stake holders (clarifying questions can’t be answered to focus scope)

– overly detailed or prescriptive RFP template (no flexibility for consultant to define solution appropriate to problem statement)

– data gap (research objectives can’t be meet with available data)

– in-flight or concurrent changes (implementation and measurement of project recommendations will muddled with other ongoing work — happens a lot with software projects)

– rudeness (expect lack of collaboration during project and legalistic approach to measuring project deliverables)

– unrealistic timeline (project to be completed faster than bid cycle? pregnancy fallacy that you can use more resources and complete serial processes on parallel timeline)

Some of these factors can be mitigated in the proposal or throughout the course of the project, but when you see these upfront they are flags you may be in for the winners curse.