Client comes to consultant only when meet with problem they have no idea how to deal with or they occupied no enough resources needed to solve the problem, which becomes sourced of consulting proposal. But the problem that client illustrated varied wildly that make consultant sometimes at a loss.
Some problem is well defined, for example, client says we want a performance management system, but another problem is hard to define before intervention, such as we have problem of lack of talent. This kind of problem seeks a goal that is believed to exist but its detailed nature, its location and the path there is uncertain. As with a journey into the unknown, it is easy on these projects to lose your way; to take wrong turnings; to waste time; to fail to meet the goal. But first you must recognize that you have to deal with a messy problem.
The challenge for the consultant is where to draw the boundaries; focus on the wrong area and your intervention may be ineffective. This challenge is depicted in Figure: clients are faced with many predicaments but not well-defined, time and resource bounded projects are designed by consultants to address them.
It is difficulty to make a good fit between predicaments and project proposal, because before intervention we can not fully understands the client’s situation and designs an appropriate approach. The only way of designing is initiate study of client and finds suitable method to address the problem and draw boundaries beyond resource of both parties. For client, they have to think about budged, culture, politic and technical involved, feel reluctantly let consultant intervene deep in the firm. For consultant, they have to evaluate the complexity and budge, and formulate proposal accordingly. Usually, in order to save engine and time, consultant used to define problem and makes it standard procedural, useless client put forward different idea and agree to change budged .
This limitation during proposal is preventing consultant and client from fully understanding the problem, which could lead to discrepancies, obstacle and barriers for project exertion, and also heavily influence the whole consulting project outcomes. The paradox exists, especially when both consultant and client can not precisely define the problem, and they all want to solve the problem but don’t know the nature and content of problem, which makes their goodwill turns out to be nightmare.