Contained consultancy - in this stage, we are engaged directly with a either a business manager or a IT manager (either C-level or lower) that is clear that he has enough "bodies" and "hands" to do the job, knows that at some inherent level, all of his employees are good enough or better for the job they are in, and yet is clear that something is suffering or is below an acceptable level. This can be customer experience, network performance, time to resolution or all/other. We work with him/her to better understand the landscape of their environment, never reaching further then their experience of the environment. This provides them with validation of their experience, confidence to deal with the problem themselves, as they may already know most, if not all of their own team issues.
Team Injection - in this stage, the management team is clear that either they need more information about their team's inner workings, that they now realize that they need an extra hand in the workload, or they are looking for a more intimate way to engage with the exact issues they are aware of. We deploy one or more engineers into the IT team(s) in question as an "employee" and get them all the access and real task list to help the team. As they get integrated, they gain first hand knowledge of the issues that plague the group and the exact nature of the inefficiencies and breakdowns in policies and procedures. This can be based on several methods:
Project based - consultants are deployed to the project team
Contract based - consultants are deployed to the employee team as contractors
Review/Respond/Revisit - the management team and our consultants review the details of the engagement that they have been working in and define a list of issues. Working together, a plan is created as to how to deal with the items in the review and facilitate improvement. As part of that process, action items as responses are developed and enacted at a pace defined along with. As they are enacted, details of the effect are collected and reviewed periodically to monitor progress.
We work in this fashion for however long is necessary or requested so as to improve the overall effectiveness of the team and each of its members individually.