Davide Koster Consulting and Activity
What is the difference between a Management Consultant and a Subject Matter Expert?
This is an interesting question.
Ask yourself these two questions:
1. What is a Management Consultant?
2. What is a Subject Matter Expert?
Davide Koster- The Institute of Management Consultancy states that consultancy is the service provided to business, public and the other undertakings by an independent and qualified person” “The creation of value for organisations, through the application of knowledge, techniques and assets, to improve performance. This is achieved through the rendering of objective advice and/or the implementation of business solutions.” This encompasses some critical points namely:
Client organisation ‘expects value’ for its investment
It needs ‘high-quality practical advice’ it can use
This advice when implemented should lead to ‘improvement in business performance’
The advice should be ‘dispassionate and impartial’ and should be ‘communicated without fear or favour’
Davide Koster- This needs SKILL, COMPETENCE AND CONFIDENCE
Therefore, the consultant uses his/her skills and knowledge about the process of change to enter into a mutual exploration towards an understanding of the meaning of the problem for the organisation as a whole using Management Consultancy Frameworks and models. The consultant’s position within the system offers a different perspective from that of the client. From this perspective, the consultant can offer new ideas that may create a new set of meanings in the organisation and allow the problem to be seen in a different way, leading to new behaviours and new relationships; these may allow the organisation to move forward in its development. In a typical business scenario, when the external consultants do not possess the domain knowledge, they also take the help of these experts either internally (from the client’s company) or externally. Management Consultants will often use a Subject Matter Expert (SME) to extract specific information to be used for the ultimate progression of an organisation. This information will assist in areas of Risk, Assurance, Governance, Change and Transformation to enable strategic progression
A Consultant is responsible for the success of a programme or series of projects – from the start to end. Most of the consultants do not work within the business that asks for their help means they come from outside the company (and business) of the client. Consultants perform higher quality analysis keeping an organization-wide view. They may or may not be an expert of any subject or field but normally they are. They must have spent good enough years in one or two fields of work with which they would have begun their own career.
Consultants must have solved various problems for their clients of varied nature and thereby they acquire a holistic view of collecting data, analyzing the same and providing solutions to the client irrespective of the inherent nature of the problem. In common parlance, they are problem solvers. They do it because they know how to approach and solve a problem howsoever difficult that may seem on the surface.
However, a SME, or domain expert is a person who is an authority in a particular area or topic. In general, an SME is used when developing materials, or a topic, and expertise on the topic is needed by the organisation, management consultant or personnel developing the material. For example, tests are often created by a team of psychometricians and a team of SMEs. The psychometricians understand how to engineer a test while the SMEs understand the actual content of the exam. Technical communicators interview SMEs to extract information and convert it into a form suitable for the audience. SMEs are often required to sign off on the documents or training developed, checking it for technical accuracy. SMEs are also necessary for the development of training materials. The SME will have spent enough time in a particular field that has given him/her the kind of experience that he/she knows most things about a particular subject and that is why they are sometimes (or often) called Subject Matter Experts or SMEs.
Davide Koster- The SME responsibilities are to:
Determine and support the implementation of a business policy, generally by providing the following;
Utilise the bottom up approach in conjunction with the Management consultant working top down
The contents for the business rules that enforce policy
The process contexts in which the rules are applied
Working as an extended team member
Meet specific, temporary project needs
Review the results of testing and simulation
Be accountable for the quality of the business rules as you have been chosen for your specific expertise .
