Operations consulting

Name the pile of work. Then put a fee on removing it.

Operations consultants are brought in when work piles up in one place: a dispatch board, a clinic schedule, a packing bench. If the proposal talks about operational excellence and never names that pile, it will lose to the person who does.

Name the pile

Stand the first paragraph on the physical or digital place where the work waits. A dispatcher with forty jobs on a whiteboard. A lab with samples unlabeled at 4 p.m. A returns table that has become a second warehouse. The client should feel that you have understood the Tuesday, not the category.

Say whose job changes. Operations work that 'involves the team' without naming the role will be attended by whoever is least busy, which is never the person who owns the pile. Put the roles in the scope.

A measure, not a transformation

Pick one measure they already feel: jobs closed per dispatcher, hours from order to shipment, patients seen before the clinic runs over. Tell them what movement would count as the outcome. A 40-page current-state assessment is a different product. If they wanted that, they would have said so.

Leave the new software out unless the pile is the software. Most operational engagements fail by becoming a systems project in week two. The proposal can say a tool may be recommended and is not included.