Hi there,

There was actually just a great Q&A on this! 

https://www.preplounge.com/en/consulting-forum/how-do-consultants-work-from-home-12159

In regards to your question honestly this really depends on the company and the project! The main advice I can give is to learn on the job and adjust/adapt to your boss's style/process.

#1 requires an immensely thorough answer that is hard to provide here. The answer for #2 is that you may engage via email, phone, in person, in workshops, etc. It all really depends on the nature of the engagement and what stage of the process you're in.

Hello!

Those are great questions! And the classical ones that you answer in the first weeks, when you do a 1-2-3 weeks onboarding in which you learn all of this. 

It totally depends on the project and its targets, but there is a lot of pre-work done and agreed. When projects are sold to clients, there is a lot of details already in the LOPs (letter of proposal) in terms of deadlines, touchpoints, objectives, deliverables… In the project you usually follow that quite closely. 

Hope it helps!

Cheers, 

Clara

1. The process depends on the specific project objective itself. Of course, most projects do require market research (and internal data gathering) and data analysis (and that is part of the hypothesis testing), etc. The work is usually separated into streams and all have those activities, but each work stream is trying to solve a different problem.

2) You have regular meetings with the client. There are also many possibilities here, but it is common to have a client point of contact (someone on their side who you will contact on a regular basis, sometimes daily). Can be one person, on team, or multiple people depending on the project size and scope. 

You should have a sponsor (i.e., the person buying the project, or the #1 responsible for it at the decision making level) which needs to be engaged frequently (weekly, every 3 weeks, …) to know how the project is progressing.

Then you will have a steering committee, i.e., the key decision makers for that project that will help with reviewing project direction, preliminary conclusions, etc. and who ultimately agree or veto your recommendations. They key executives in the company that will have to implement your recommendations should be here.

Sometimes conclusions (in the end, i.e., final report) may need to be presented to the board, if the project is relevant enough and they are not adequately represented in the Steering Committee.

There was a lot more I could say, but I hope this made it more clear.