Cloud computing is changing the business IT landscape through its ability to provide scalable computing resources without the traditional technology overhead. Now, the same characteristics powering this charge—virtualization, integration, and value-added management—are poised to alter the face of business consulting.  A new cloud consulting white paper highlights the parallels between cloud computing and cloud consulting, as pioneered by M Squared Consulting, and explains how the new model is an effective alternative to the expensive, cumbersome, and outdated traditional consulting model.

In a groundbreaking article released this week, M Squared Consulting launched the innovative concept of cloud consulting™, which could transform how organizations meet their consulting needs.  “Similar to how cloud computing has forever changed the face of IT, cloud consulting will soon become the norm for skills-based delivery,” said Marion McGovern, the white paper’s author and founder & CEO of M Squared Consulting.

So what defines the “cloud” in this new model? The definitions may be as varied as the clouds they describe but the key elements remain very consistent. A cloud is built on virtual resources that are integrated, managed, and available on demand. In general, a cloud provides:

• On-demand access to a full range of resources
• No overhead infrastructure costs
• Use-driven pricing
• Reliability
• Scalability
• Flexibility
• Geographic Independence

In addition to these elements, the cloud has a unique ability to accommodate shifting business demands. By its very nature, the cloud is changeable, adapting to meet the needs of the business. By staying in step with business changes, the cloud provides greater agility and a competitive edge.

The Cloud—Remaking the Face of Consulting

Cloud consulting, as pioneered by M Squared Consulting, applies these core cloud concepts to professional services by integrating and managing virtual human capital to deliver an on-demand, cost-effective, reliable, and scalable resource system. By reflecting how human capital and intelligence resources are really employed, the consulting cloud is able to support business processes and resource demands at a cost that more closely reflects their true utilization.

It is important to note that how resources are linked and delivered defines the cloud more so than the resources themselves. For instance, in cloud computing, the resources are more commodity-like. But in cloud consulting, the resources are more specialized. In each case, it is the virtualization, integration, and management of the resources that makes the cloud a “cloud.”

Clouds on the Horizon

Today’s economic climate has forced companies to find ways to operate more cost-effectively. With fiscal pressures showing no signs of retreat, these cost concerns will continue to grow in all areas of business. And, because of its cost efficiency, so will the cloud concept.

By applying the cloud principles of virtualization, integration, and managed oversight, cloud consulting can help companies make their human capital and consulting budgets work harder and more productively.

To view or download the new Cloud Consulting whitepaper, please visit http://www.msquared.com/home/m2/Whitepapers/cloudconsulting.pdf

This week’s guest post is contributed by Terry Healey, an M Squared consultant.  He can be reached at terry@ridgeviewconsulting.com

Building a complete and differentiated go-to-market plan is something all marketing professionals strive to achieve. We typically follow a methodology to ensure that the target customer is at the center of the plan and that we have a clear and compelling value to generate a positive response.

Many of us learned about Neil H. Borden’s “The Concept of the Marketing Mix”, circa 1964.  The ingredients of Borden’s Marketing Mix centered on the four P’s – product, pricing, placement (or distribution), and promotion. But those four P’s require that the marketing professional develop the optimal mix, including market insights, developing integrated marketing/sales programs, and ensuring the necessary measurement tools and metrics are in place. Unfortunately, those actions too often become afterthoughts of building that differentiated go-to-market plan.

Assuring Success with the 4 M’s
The key to a successful plan based on the 4 P’s means starting with a framework from the outset that includes what I like to call “the four M’s”; Market Intelligence, Modeling, Mix, and Measurement. The four M’s are the marketing activities which act as the glue that binds marketing and sales together. Ensuring that sales and marketing have skin in the game motivates both teams to achieve marketing objectives with focus ultimately on revenue.

1. Market Intelligence and Analysis

Just as anyone raising money to fund a start up needs a great idea, they also need a large and growing market that they believe they’ll be able to address. In the same way, regardless of the maturity of your company, you need to develop a business case for what part of the market you intend to address, why it makes sense, and how you are going to do it. The process of researching the total addressable market for your proposed product or service is only a small piece of the analysis necessary. Identifying the viable market segments that your solution can address, along with understanding the customer profile and primary business drivers are the baseline for any plan. Whether you have a solution that requires prospecting for new customers, or perhaps you have the benefit of an installed customer base that you can cross-sell and up-sell into - the same rules apply. Do your research - analyze the data to determine what slice of the market you intend to address, what challenge you will solve, and what benefits your solution offers that are differentiating from the competition. But, once again, before you assume you have all the answers, be sure to make part of your primary research talking to your sales teams about their knowledge of the market and their customer base.

2. Modeling

·     With a lot of great data that’s been sliced and diced, you can now justify moving the plan to the next stage. Nomenclature aside, your next step is to model a “program”, a holistic set of resources, tools, and activities that enable both your sales force to be effective, and your customers to engage with your organization. The key to this is to ensure you provide sales with prescriptive instructions on how to use the resources and when to use them. And don’t think of sales enablement separately from demand generation. The two should be tightly linked. Sales enablement tools and resources you provide your sales people should be integrated with customer engagement demand generating tactics (telemarketing scripts, emailers) so that sales is part of the marketing engine and marketing is helping to drive sales funnel.

·  So that sales understands how marketing intends to create an ongoing customer experience, providing details on how the entire program or campaign will work helps everyone take ownership in the outcome. Building the marketing funnel means that marketing must invest in awareness activities (email, advertising, tradeshows, and PR), consideration activities (web/seminars, whitepapers, case studies), and preference activities (demos, ROI Tools). When sales has a window into the logic behind the marketing program, they can effectively leverage each prospect interaction and the offers that have initiated a response.

·  Close the loop with review teams that provide continual feedback on the approach, validating or invalidating the tactics themselves. The job of Program Modeling is about accelerating sales cycles, and helping sales to move customers more quickly from the prospect stage to the  propose stage.

               3. Marketing Mix

Marketing mix is not just about ensuring that you are reaching customers, analysts, and the press in a myriad of ways, but utilizing step one (Market Intelligence and Analysis) to serve as the guide to how you should focus your efforts, and with how much emphasis. If your company or product is immature, awareness is critical. If you are marketing to your installed base, your emphasis may reside more in the consideration and preference stages. After all, you are marketing to existing customers who are familiar with your brand, but may not understand why they should upgrade or build upon the solution they already have. Targeted demand generation with case study offers, whitepapers, ROI tools, or financing may prove to generate high response rates.

               4. Measure

·  You might be thinking “I cannot get the funding for a robust system to measure my marketing activities.” That may indeed be the case, but today there are great hosted solutions that enable you to have an integrated marketing and measurement system up and running in just a few days. At the end of the day, you have to justify your marketing spend, and measure your return on marketing investment.

·  As importantly, you need to measure response rates, leads, and appointments set so that you can refine, improve, and optimize your campaigns based on what prospects are responding to, what they are registering for, and what content they are downloading. And without all those measurements, good luck getting budget for next years’ marketing campaign.

Adding the four M’s is not designed to make things more complicated. The four M’s methodology ensures that the fundamental aspects of your plan and strategy are sound and can be executed and measured. As we all know, a great marketing strategy does not always translate into an effectively executed plan. And if you cannot measure your execution, you better be a great sales person, because you will be selling a new marketing approach to your leadership team every year. But don’t worry - there won’t be all that many years that you will have to sell that plan if you don’t know how to measure it.

For more information on how to better plan and execute your marketing programs, contact M Squared Consulting at 415-391-1038.

The cover story in the current issue of BusinessWeek entitled “The Permanent Temporary Workforce” is a fascinating read about the state of the American workforce.  The article describes the hardships faced by those affected by layoffs, and how many companies are turning to temporary help to protect profits in the economic downturn.

But in contrast to similar articles in recent years, the authors here point out that the current recession has fueled a “leadership on demand” phenomenon, meaning that many of the temporary workers are white-collar professionals, not “sneaker-footed admins”.  Many are seasoned professionals who relish the flexibility of a free-agent lifestyle.  “People with sought-after skills can earn more by jumping from assignment to assignment than they can by sticking with one company,” the authors write.

Déjà vu?

In her groundbreaking book, “A New Brand of Expertise: How Independent Consultants, Free Agents, and Interim Managers are Transforming the World of Work,” published in 2001, M Squared Consulting founder and CEO Marion McGovern tackled this very subject in some depth.

In particular, in the chapter about why many professionals choose “free agency”, Ms. McGovern’s writings are more relevant today than ever:

“Whether it is control over where they work, their hours, or their vacations, overwhelmingly it is a desire to make work fit into their lives and not vice versa.  One of our consultants of Dutch descent explained that she became an independent practitioner because she thought that American vacation structures were untenable; being used to at least six weeks of vacation annually, she couldn’t continue in the American mode of two weeks per year.  In today’s 24×7 world, time has a currency all its own.”

She continues….

“Some consultants want control over what they do, a sphere of influence that as a mere mortal in a large enterprise was beyond their reach.  At M Squared Consulting, we see this often with the alumni from large consulting firms.  Exposed to many types of industries and products, they may have been able to indentify the type of work they most enjoyed, but they may not have had the opportunity to do it again.  For these individuals, the type of work – the “what” – is most critical.

So in addition to being prescient, McGovern’s book illustrates that there are some long-term trends in place affecting American business, and the savvy consultant can take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves and thrive in today’s work environment.  And challenge, pay, and control are not the sole discretion of either the employer or employee.

With its collaborative approach, long-term relationships, and commitment to the success of both its clients and consultants, it’s no wonder that M Squared Consulting attracts top-tier professionals to its network.  To join the M Squared consultant community, please register on our website at http://www.msquared.com/consultants/join.html

With the New Year upon us, many companies are finalizing their 2010 goals and objectives through a process called “Strategic Planning.”  Done well, strategic planning is not an easy process, but those companies that do it well will be rewarded, and those that don’t can face serious challenges.

At M Squared Consulting, we’re committed to helping clients achieve their business objectives, and offer these tips for sound Strategic Planning:

Plan and Process

An organization’s strategic plan should:

• Be ongoing and never-ending
• Represent a shared vision of where the business is headed and what is needed to get there
• Be integrated into a continuous business cycle

The Planning Team

The strategic planning team should represent a broad spectrum of segments within the organization.

• The ideal size is nine to 15 members with an outside facilitator.
• The CEO must serve as the strategic plan’s “spiritual leader.”
• Choose planning team members based on merit, not rank or entitlement.

The Planning Process

The strategic planning process consists of an orderly sequence of activities, each contributing to the success of the whole. The process should take place off-site, away from telephones, faxes, etc., so that team members can “disengage” from day-to-day operations.

Best Practices:

• Practice creative thinking. Generate as many ideas a possible during the early, “out-of-the-box” mode.
• Take a critical, unbiased look at what has worked before and what hasn’t.
• Identify the best of your past business practices and drop others that have led to costly mistakes.
• Create four to six long-term goals linked to the organization’s vision.
• Devise strategies to achieve these goals and objectives.
• For each objective, create specific action steps.

The Mission Statement

A mission statement describes what an organization does, what markets it serves and what it seeks to accomplish in the future.

• The mission statement describes how the business serves customers so they will underwrite its strategy.
• It serves as a guide for day-to-day operations and as the foundation for future decision-making.
• For employees, a strong mission statement builds commitment, loyalty and motivation.

Best Practices:

• Describe the essence of the business in words your employees and customers can understand and remember.
• Focus on specific traits and on target or niche markets.
• When the mission statement is created, post it on conference walls, on promotional materials, even on the packaging of products.

Goals and Objectives

Strategic planning identifies an organization’s goals and objectives. Goals set the agenda and are global in nature. Objectives are more specific and short-term.

• Goals identify areas where a major transition must occur (a transition is described as “from … to”).
• Objectives should be measurable, quantifiable and consistent.

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats) analysis is a tool for looking critically at the organization.

Best Practices:

• Draw upon a variety of perspectives – from the CEO to employees, customers and others who rely upon the business.
• Identify only those tangible and intangible assets and obstacles that are tied to your company’s long-term goals.
• Gather “competitive intelligence” by purchasing a competitor’s product, hiring one of its ex-employees or visiting its booth at trade shows and conferences.
• Collect information on the Internet by viewing a competitor’s Web site and/or searching online publications.

Implementing the Plan

The results of the strategic planning process must be integrated with an organization’s daily, weekly and monthly routines.

Best Practices:

• The CEO should develop a “stump speech” around the plan – promoting its values, mission statement, actions, etc. – and spread the word wherever possible.
• Enlist a support person (or “champion”) for each strategy and action.
• Organize top and middle managers into a “strategy team” that become agents for change. The CEO should receive direct reports from these teams on a regular basis.
• Avoid common implementation mistakes such as: (1) lack of communication throughout the company; (2) treating the plan as something separate and removed from the management process; and (3) choosing to make intuitive decisions that clash with the plan’s accepted objectives.
• Set up a feedback mechanism so that employees can respond to the strategic plan.
• Share the plan with other stakeholders – investors, customers, alliance partners, etc.
• Keep the plan alive by monitoring its ongoing progress. Conduct 60- or 90-daysenior management reviews. Implement objectives by expanding employee skills through training and recruitment.
• Target sales to make the link between business strategy and sales strategy.
• Reward success to increase employee motivation.

These suggestions should put you on a path toward a successful Strategic Planning session.  Should you need help with your program, please contact us at M Squared Consulting.  Best wishes for a prosperous New Year!