Team Consulting

Cutter has pioneered, with great success, Team Consulting engagements. With Team Consulting, a group of Cutter consultants work together on a complex, multi-dimensional problem that crosses “specialty” lines. This approach is surprisingly cost-effective, thanks to tight organization, automated collaboration tools, and Cutter’s ability to call upon just the right people for the task from its community of experts. One of Cutter’s Senior Consultants serves as project lead—your single point of contact. After conducting interviews, the lead assembles an ad hoc team of Cutter consultants, each with a skill and experience set that supplements the lead’s own. The lead prepares specific questions for the collaborators, organizes the responses, and presides over team discussions conducted by phone, Wiki, web conference, etc. Each team member participates for only as long as is necessary to contribute his or her knowledge, research, and reactions to the work of others. You receive a converged recommendation written and presented by the project lead (elaborations and dissents included) that represents the individual and collective wisdom of a diverse team of hand-picked experts.

Client Profile: Federal government agency

Project Focus: Review procedures and recommend improvements for a mission-critical process
Consulting Type: Team Consulting
Practice Area: Enterprise Architecture

A government agency charged with resolving complex financial crises in a very short time-frame asked Cutter to review its procedures and recommend improvements to some specific tasks. We were asked to explore whether other fields, unrelated to finance or government, faced the same kinds of challenges and whether the solutions they used were applicable in this case. In addition we were asked to comment on other parts of their mission-critical process. John Tibbetts, a member of the Enterprise Architecture practice, saw the value in “casting a wide net,” and invited 7 other Cutter consultants – Lou Mazzucchelli, Larissa Moss, Ken Orr, Mike Rosen, Mark Seiden, Bill Ulrich, and Jim Watson – to contribute their experiences and expertise. The resulting study summarized discussion by the Cutter experts on 8 different topics including algorithms, process optimization, opportunities for parallelism, workflow and case-handling, processing models including datacenter-in-a-can and cloud computing, and portal security. There were sense-of-the-team recommendations, and where the experts disagreed we included minority opinions as well.

Client Profile: International policy organization

Project Focus: Knowledge management and social networking solutions
Consulting Type: Team Consulting
Practice Area: Business Intelligence

A multi-lateral organization involved in international policy, law, and aid wanted to acquire a global knowledge management system that would allow them to share information among disparate agencies and that would include a social networking component. They asked Cutter for advice. John Tibbetts, of Cutter’s Enterprise Architecture Practice, assembled had a team of expert Cutter consultants including David Coleman, a leading expert on collaborative strategies, Lou Mazzucchelli, a software business acquisition expert, and Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki. The team produced a report that compared leading commercial collaboration software providers, a Software-as-a-Service provider, and an open source solution with accompanying commercial support. The deliverable included a summary of vendor options, a rollout plan, plus anticipated capital and operating expenses for the first two years.